“Your letter did not reach me till yesterday, eight days after its date, so that, though this be the earliest reply, perhaps it may not arrive at Cork till after your departure. This place is better suited for me than you imagine—it tempts me to take far more exercise than I ever took elsewhere, for we have the loveliest scenes possible close at hand; and I have, therefore, seldom or never felt myself in stronger health. And as for good spirits, be sure I have the outward and visible sign, however it may be for the inward and spiritual grace.
“My reviewing, more than ordinarily procrastinated, stands still. I began Clarke’s book, and having vented my gall there, laid the others all by till the first
* A favourite terrier. |
| 230 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 29. |
“It seems we are to have war with poor Portugal. If
this be the case, my uncle must of course settle in England. This would be very
pleasant to me, were it not so deeply and rootedly my own desire to settle in
Portugal; but, adonde não he remedio, então
paciencia, as I learnt from the Portuguese. This war has
affected me in every possible shape; in the King George
packet I lost a whole cargo of books.
| Ætat. 29. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 231 |
“I must go to work for money; and that also frets me. This hand-to-mouth work is very disheartening, and interferes cruelly with better things,—more important they cannot be called, for the bread-and-cheese is the business of the first necessity. But from my History I do expect permanent profit, and such a perpetual interest as shall relieve me. I shall write the volume of letters which you have heard me talk of,—an omnium-gatherum of the odd things I have seen in England.
“Whenever you are at a decent distance, and can get
leave of absence, do come. Get to Liverpool by water, or, still better, to
Whitehaven. You will be thoroughly delighted with the country. The mountains,
on Thursday evening, before the sun was quite down, or the moon bright, were
all of one dead-blue colour; their rifts, and rocks, and swells, and scars had
all disappeared—the surface was perfectly uniform, nothing but the
outline distinct; and this even surface of dead blue, from its unnatural
uniformity, made them, though not transparent, appear transvious,—as
though they were of some soft or cloudy texture through which you could have
passed. I never saw any appearance so perfectly unreal. Sometimes a blazing
sunset seems to steep them through and through with red light; or it is a
cloudy morning, and the sunshine slants down through a rift in the clouds, and
the pillar of light makes the spot whereon it falls so emerald green, that it
looks like a little field of Paradise. At night you lose the
| 232 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 29. |
“There is a carpenter here, James Lawson by name, who is become my Juniper* in the board-making way. He has made me a pair, of walnut, the large size, and of a reddish wood, from Demerara the small, and is about to get me some yew. This, as you may suppose, is a consolation to me, and it requires all Edith’s powers of prudential admonition to dissuade me from having a little table with a drawer in it. His father† asked Derwent yesterday who made him? D.: James Lawson. Father: And what did he make you of? D.: The stuff he makes wood of. When Derwent had got on thus far in his system of Derwentogony, his imagination went on, and he added,—‘he sawed me off, and I did not like it.’
“We began to wonder uneasily that there was no news of you. Edith’s love. God bless you!
