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.
. Previously published: Charles Cuthbert Southey (ed.), Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, 6 vols (London, 1849–1850), III, pp. 139–142.
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.
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.
Your letter followed me to London, – the hope which it held out that we might meet there, & the endless round of
occupations in which I was involved during the whole nine weeks of my absence prevented me from thanking you for Marmion,
Half the poem I had read at Hebers before my own copy arrived. I
went punctually to breakfast with him, & he was long enough dressing for me to <to let me> devour so much of it. –
The story is made of better materials than the Lay,On As a whole it has
not pleased me well <so much>, in parts it has pleased me more. There is nothing so finely conceived in your former
poem as the death of Marmion, – there is nothing finer in its conception any where.
The introductory epistles I did not wish away, because as poems they gave me great pleasure, but I wished them at the
end of the volume, or at the beginning, anywhere except where they were. My taste is perhaps peculiar in disliking all interruptions in
narrative poetry. When the poets lets his story sleep & talks of in his own person it has to me the same sort
of unpleasant effect that is produced at the end of an Act; when you are alive to know what follows, & lo – down comes
the curtain & the fiddlers begin with their abominations. The general opinion is with me in this particular instance.
I am highly gratified by your the manner in which you speak of Kirke Whites Remains.
I saw Frerepreparing & printing, – at least it will be as long before
the book can be published. The price of paper stops all my other press-work for the present.
My <So much of my> life passes so much in this blessed retirement, that when I go to London the effect is a
little like what Nourjahad used to find after one of his long naps.Ever like my Ishmael-like my hand has been against every body, & every bodys hand against me. Wordsworth is the only man who agrees with me on both points, or whom I
require <however> no other sanction to convince me that I am right. Coleridge justifies the Danish attack on Denmark, but he justifies it upon individual testimony of hostile
intentions on the part of that court & that testimony by no means amounts to proof in my judgement – But what is done is done;
& the endless debates upon the subject which have no other meaning & can have no other end than that of harrassing the
ministry, disgust me, as they do every one who has the honour of England at heart. Such a system here makes the publicity of
debate a nuisance, & will terminate in putting a stop to it.
Is there any hope of seeing you this year at the Lakes? I should much like to show you Kehama the Almighty.p my projected series of mythological poems,
& said also for what reason the project had been laid aside. He besought me to go on with them, & said he would print them at
his expense. Without the least thought of accepting this princely offer, it has stung me to the very core; & as the bite of the
tarantula has no cure but dancing, so will there be none but singing for this. Great poets have no envy; – little ones are full of it.
I doubt whether any man ever criticised a good poem maliciously, unless he had written a bad one himself, & I would lay a wager
that Jeffray has written made verses. – I beg my remembrances to
Mrs Scott –