“Did you ever watch the sands of an hour-glass? When I
was first at Oxford, one of these old-fashioned measurers of time was part of
my furniture. I rose at four o’clock, and portioned out my studies by the
hour. When the sands ran low, my attention was often attracted by observing how
much faster they appeared to run. Applying this image to human life, which it
has so often been brought to illustrate, (whether my sands run low or not, is
known only to Him by whom this frail vessel was made, but assuredly they run
fast), it seems as if the weeks of my youth were longer than the months of
middle age, and that I could get through more in a day then, than in a week
now. Since I wrote to you, I have scarcely done anything but versify; and
certain it is that twenty years ago, I could have produced the same quantity of
verses in a fourth part of the time. It is true they would have been more
faulty; but the very solicitude to avoid faults, and the slow and dreaming
state which it induces, may be considered as indications that the season for
poetry is gone by,—that I am falling into the yellow leaf, or, to use a more
consoling metaphor, and perhaps a more applicable one, that poetry is but the
blossom of an intellect so constituted as mine, and that with me the fruit is
set,—in sober phrase, that it would be wisely done, if henceforth I confined
myself to sober prose.
| Ætat. 42. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 147 |
“The affair of Lavalette, in France, pleases me well, except as far as regards the treatment of his wife for having done her duty. The king ought not to have pardoned him, and the law ought to have condemned him: both did as they ought, and, as far as depended upon them, his civil life was at an end. I should have had no pity for him if the axe had fallen; but a condemned criminal making his escape becomes a mere human creature striving for life, and the Devil take him, say I, who would not lend a hand to assist him, except in cases of such atrocious guilt as make us abhor and execrate the perpetrator, and render it unfit that he should exist upon earth.
“Of home politics, I grieve to say that the more I
think of them, the worse they appear. All imaginable causes which produce
revolution are at work among us; the solitary principle of education is the
only counteracting power; and God knows this is very partial, very limited, and
must be slow in its effects, even if it were upon a wider scale and a more
permanent foundation. If another country were in this state, I should say,
without hesitation, that revolution was at hand there, and that it was
inevitable. If I hesitate at predicting to myself the same result here, it is
from love or from weakness, from hope that we may mercifully be spared so
dreadful a chastisement for our follies and our sins, and from fear of
| 148 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 42. |
