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Boston Public Library, MS C.1.22.5. Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), I, pp. 214-217 [dated 1803].
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
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If I am not greatly deceived the Scotch Review
Sint licet expertes vitæ sensusque, capessunt
Jussa tamen Superûm venti.
The Destroyers arrow cannot kill Lobaba, but does kill Aloadins Bird.a brittle & destructible.
Lobaba is ‘knockd down by a shower of sand of his own
rising.’
Thalaba is enabled to read the unintelligible letters on the ring
by the help of some other unintelligible letters on a locust. look at the poem
& you will see that this is falsely stated.that to find faults which he might abuse.
had he read it with honest attention this objection could not have been
invented. the Spirit in the Tent told him We knew from the Race of Hodeirah the
destined Destroyer should come.
I was more pleased than praise usually can please me, when you
told me that you liked Thalaba. because it is of approbation like yours that I
am most desirous. do not misunderstand this as a flattering compliment – it was
not as a critical reader to whose critical opinion I could defer that I looked
for your approbation. but as a man who would read with no nine-&-thirty
articlesimpute as a disposition <suspect> an unfair
disposition in the writers mind? Some instances of such misrepresentation I have
already pointed out. there remain enough other such. because I have imitated one
passage (& that a most beautiful one) from Bishop Taylor,pri feeling of pride as well as
honesty, I gave in my notes all the hints & traditions of which I had
availed myself, he calls the poem says I have
versified my common-place book, & allows me no invention, never noticing
what of the story is wholly original, nor that the structure of the whole is so.
now I will avow myself confident enough to ask you if you know any other poem of
equal originality except the Faery Queen,
With regard to that part of the Review which relates to Wordsworth, it has obviously no
relation whatever to Thalaba. nor can there be a stronger proof of want of
discernment, or want of candour, than in grouping together three men so
different in style as Wordsworth & Coleridge & myself under one head. the fault of Coleridge has been a too-swelling diction. you who know his poems
know xxx whether they ought to be abused for
mean language. Of Thalaba the language rises & falls with the subject, &
is always in a high key. I wish you would read the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth. some of them are
very faulty, but indeed I would risk my whole future fame on the assertion that
they will one <day> be regarded as the finest poems in our language. I
refer you particularly to The Brothers, a poem on Tintern Abbey, & Michael.
My dear friend I have a full & well grounded faith in the
hope you express that my reputation will indeed stand high hereafter. already I
have enough, but it will be better discriminated hereafter. Upon Madoctaking <exercising> severe revision. you will see Thalaba
corrected whenever it be reprinted. my time is unhappily frittered away in
little money-getting employments, of silent & obscure exertion haud facile
emergunt quorum virtutibus &cwhic so long as our language & our literature endure
I have had an unpleasant affair with my publishers. I engaged to
make a version of Amadis of Gaul
Robert Lovell has no claim to the freedom of London. his father was a Quaker of Bristol. Coleridge is with me, & I believe going abroad for his health which suffers dreadfully from this climate.