Material from the Romantic Circles Website may not be downloaded, reproduced or disseminated in any manner without authorization unless it is for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and/or classroom use as provided by the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended.
Unless otherwise noted, all Pages and Resources mounted on Romantic Circles are copyrighted by the author/editor and may be shared only in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Except as expressly permitted by this statement, redistribution or republication in any medium requires express prior written consent from the author/editors and advance notification of Romantic Circles. Any requests for authorization should be forwarded to Romantic Circles:>
By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the following conditions:
Users are not permitted to download these texts and images in order to mount them on their own servers. It is not in our interest or that of our users to have uncontrolled subsets of our holdings available elsewhere on the Internet. We make corrections and additions to our edited resources on a continual basis, and we want the most current text to be the only one generally available to all Internet users. Institutions can, of course, make a link to the copies at Romantic Circles, subject to our conditions of use.
Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 298, Series I, Box 1, folder 36. Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), II, pp. 327-330.
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.
All quotation marks and apostrophes have been changed: " for “," for ”, ' for ‘, and ' for ’.
Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.
Because of web browser variability, all hyphens have been typed on the U.S. keyboard.
Dashes have been rendered as a variable number of hyphens to give a more exact rendering of their length.
Southey's spelling has not been regularized.
Writing in other hands appearing on these manuscripts has been indicated as such, the content recorded in brackets.
& has been used for the ampersand sign.
£ has been used for £, the pound sign
All other characters, those with accents, non-breaking spaces, etc., have been encoded in HTML entity decimals.
I owe you a letter, & it is time the debt should be paid; so your Mamma will let me write to you instead of her, especially as I have been stationary at Streatham ever since I wrote, & consequently can have nothing to communicate.
As I know you read the newspaper for the sake of seeing whether Buonaparte has been killed, how the Kingbut
if you & he will look in a book about Petrarchmust should be gathered from the grove on that mountain where the nine sisters take care of my winged horse;
I am teaching the two eldest of your Cousins to say la, la, la, look at the lamb & the lark: & wa, wa, wa, we will walk. Herbert learns this much more readily than his brother. They are very good children, & are grown very fond of me. I tickle & toss them whenever we meet, & sometimes kiss Duke Bruin, who is Ursa Major or the Great Bear, & is the best kissing of the three. But kissing him is a very different thing from kissing my own Bertha Bruin, & Kate, & Isabee-bo-bell. My Aunt would be very willing to visit us, & bring the three Bears with her, but I fear my Uncle will not be persuaded to move. Earl Bruin, the little wee bear, is very little older than Isabel, & does not talk; but Marquis Bruin, the middle Bear, has an ursine language of his own which is very winning. His daily subject of complaint is that nobody will be married, & so he can get no wedding cake.
You must tell your Mamma that I have seen a letter to day, from Mrs Piozzir Davies,d, may perhaps make her jealous, if she heard of it from any other quarter than from me
myself. Mrs Piozzi hearing that I am at Streatham, & expecting
to find me there when she comes herself, bids me beware of “a solitary woman” with “bright blue eyes” altho “her hair be grey.” –
She writes a sprightly letter, full of life & spirits, & in a firm, full, strong hand, which as a sample of
pen-womanship is remarkably fine, but considering her time of life, is really wonderful.
I have bought for you some Arabian Tales in three volumes,
Do not forget your lessons while I am absent. I shall not be pleased if you lose ground. Tell Lunus to look over the poems which I made for him about the <his>
Greek & have them all at the tip of his tongue when I return.
Your Mamma will like to know all the news of my intended operations which I can send
her. Tell her then that I am getting on well with my business, in every sense of the word. That I go to town on Friday, when Coleridge will be asked to dine with me at Harry’s: on Sunday I dine & sleep at Holland House, – the Wednesday following dine at Mr
Vaughans
And now my dear Edithling, farewell. Give my love to Wilsey; – the Doctor enquired particularly for her. Say to your Aunt Coleridge that I long to sneeze & snap my toes at home once more: & tell
the Senhora that poor I am getting sleepy,
for it is half past nine o clock, sufficient for the day hath been the labour thereof. I am Simorghish
I hope Lord Nelson, Bona Fidelia, & Madame Catalani continue well.
Next week I shall write to Herbert.