The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey
Robert Southey to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4 August 1802
“In reply to your letter there are so many things to be
said that I know not where to begin. First and foremost, then, about Keswick,
and the pros and cons for domesticating there. To live cheap,—to save the
crushing expense of furnishing a house;—sound, good, mercantile motives!
Then come the ghosts of old Skiddaw and Great Robinson;—the whole
eye-wantonness of lakes and mountains,—and a host of other feelings,
which eight years have modified and moulded, but which have rooted like oaks,
the stronger for their shaking. But then your horrid latitude! and incessant
rains! . . . . and I myself one of your greenhouse plants, pining for want of
sun. For Edith, her mind’s eyes
are ![]()
| 190 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
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squinting about it; she wants to go, and she is
afraid for my health. . . . . Some time hence I must return to Portugal, to
complete and correct my materials and outlines: whenever that may be, there
will be a hindrance and a loss in disposing of furniture, supposing I had it.
Now, I am supposing that this I should find at Keswick, and this preponderance
would fall like a ton weight in the scale. . . . . As to your Essays, &c.
&c., you spawn plans like a herring; I only wish as many of the seed were
to vivify in proportion. . . . . Your Essays on Contemporaries I am not much
afraid of the imprudence of, because I have no expectation that they will ever
be written; but if you were to write, the scheme projected upon the old poets
would be a better scheme, because more certain of sale, and in the execution
nothing invidious. Besides, your sentence would fall with greater weight upon
the dead: however impartial you may be, those who do not read your books will
think your opinion the result of your personal attachments, and that very
belief will prevent numbers from reading it. Again, there are some of these
living poets to whom you could not fail of giving serious pain; Hayley, in particular,—and everything
about that man is good except his poetry. Bloomfield I saw in London, and an interesting man he
is—even more than you would expect. I have reviewed his Poems with the express object of serving
him; because if his fame keeps up ![]()
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to another volume, he
will have made money enough to support him comfortably in the country: but in a
work of criticism how could you bring him to the touchstone? and to lessen his
reputation is to mar his fortune.
“We shall probably agree altogether some day upon
Wordsworth’s Lyrical Poems. Does he not
associate more feeling with particular phrases, and you also with him, than
those phrases can convey to any one else? This I suspect. Who would part with a
ring of a dead friend’s hair? and yet a jeweller will give for it only
the value of the gold: and so must words pass for their current value.
“. . . . . I saw a number of notorious people after you
left London. Mrs. Inchbald,—an odd
woman, but I like her. Campbell . . . .
who spoke of old Scotch ballads with contempt! Fuseli . . . . Flaxman,
whose touch is better than his feeling, Bowles . . . . Walter
Whiter, who wanted to convert me to believe in Rowley. Perkins, the Tractorist*, a demure-looking rogue. Dr. Busby,—oh! what a Dr.
Busby!—the great musician! the greater than Handel! who is to be the husband of
St. Cecilia in his seraph state, . . . . and he set at
me with a dead compliment! Lastly, Barry, the painter: poor fellow! he is too mad and too miserable to
laugh at.
“. . . . . Heber
sent certain volumes of Thomas Aquinas
to your London lodgings, where peradventure they
* This alludes to Perkins’s magnetic Tractors.
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| 192 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
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still remain. I have one volume of the old Jockey,
containing quaint things about angels; and one of Scotus Erigena; but if there be any pearls in those dunghills,
you must be the cock to scratch them out,—that is not my dunghill. What
think you of thirteen folios of Franciscan history? I am grown a great
Jesuitophilist, and begin to think that they were the most enlightened
personages that ever condescended to look after this ‘little snug farm
of the earth.’ Loyola
himself was a mere friar . . . . . but the missionaries were made of admirable
stuff. There are some important questions arising out of this subject. The
Jesuits have not only succeeded in preaching Christianity where our Methodists,
&c., fail, but where all the other orders of their own church have failed
also; they had the same success every where, in Japan as in Brazil. . . . . My
love to Sara, if
so it must be . . . . however, as it is the casting out of a Spiritus
Asper—which is an evil spirit—for the omen’s
sake. Amen! Tell me some more, as Moses
says, about Keswick, for I am in a humour to be persuaded,—and if I may
keep a jackass there for Edith! I have a
wolfskin great-coat, so hot, that it is impossible to wear it here. Now, is not
that a reason for going where it may be useful?
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 c.-1274)
Italian philosopher and saint of the Catholic Church; he was the author of
Summa theologica (1267-73).
James Barry (1741-1806)
Irish history painter, author, and member of the Royal Academy of Arts whose strong
personality made him an unpopular figure.
Robert Bloomfield (1766-1823)
The shoemaker-poet patronized by Capel Lofft; he wrote the very popular
The Farmer's Boy (1800).
William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850)
English poet and critic; author of
Fourteen Sonnets, elegiac and
descriptive, written during a Tour (1789), editor of the
Works
of Alexander Pope, 10 vols (1806), and writer of pamphlets contributing to the
subsequent Pope controversy.
Thomas Busby (1754-1838)
English composer and miscellaneous writer; his translation of Lucretius's
De rerum natura (1813) attracted ridicule.
Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
Scottish poet and man of letters; author of
The Pleasures of Hope
(1799),
Gertrude of Wyoming (1808) and lyric odes. He edited the
New Monthly Magazine (1821-30).
Hartley Coleridge [Old Bachelor] (1796-1849)
The eldest son of the poet; he was educated at Merton College, Oxford, contributed essays
in the
London Magazine and
Blackwood's, and
published
Lives of Distinguished Northerns (1832).
John Flaxman (1755-1826)
English sculptor and draftsman who studied at the Royal Academy and was patronized by
William Hayley.
Henry Fuseli (1741-1825)
Anglo-Swiss painter who settled in England in 1764 and became the friend of William
Blake.
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
German composer who settled in England in 1712 where he composed oratorios, among them
The Messiah, first produced in Dublin in 1742.
William Hayley (1745-1820)
English poet, patron of George Romney, William Cowper, and William Blake. His best-known
poem,
Triumphs of Temper (1781) was several times reprinted. Robert
Southey said of him, “everything about that man is good except his poetry.”
Richard Heber (1774-1833)
English book collector, he was the elder half-brother of the poet Reginald Heber and the
friend of Walter Scott: member of the Roxburghe Club and MP for Oxford 1821-1826.
Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821)
English actress and playwright; author of two popular novels,
A Simple
Story (1791) and
Nature and Art (1796).
Benjamin Douglas Perkins (1774-1810)
The son of Elisha Perkins and Sarah Douglass; educated at Yale, he was a bookseller in
New York City and advocate for his father's quack-medicinal “tractors.”
Edith Southey [née Fricker] (1774-1837)
The daughter of Stephen Fricker, she was the first wife of Robert Southey and the mother
of his children; they married in secret in 1795.
Walter Whiter (1758-1832)
Educated at Clare College, Cambridge, he was a clergyman, classical philologist and
friend of Richard Porson who published
A Specimen of a Commentary on
Shakspeare (1794).
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
With Coleridge, author of
Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth
survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.
