“You will, I hope, soon have a cargo to send me of your own (for the 2d vol. of the Anthology), and some from Davy. If poor Mrs. Yearsley were well, I should like much to have her name there. . . . . As yet, I have only Coleridge’s pieces and my own, amounting in the whole to some eighty or one hundred pages.
“Thalaba the Destroyer is progressive. There is a poem called ‘Gebir,’ of which I know not whether my review be yet printed (in the Critical), but in that review you will find some of the most exquisite poetry in the language. The poem is such as Gilbert*, if he were only half as mad as he is, could have written. I would go an hundred miles to see the anonymous author.
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* Author of “The Hurricane.” |
| Ætat. 25. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 25 |
“My other hard work now is gutting the libraries here, and laying in a good stock of notes and materials, arranged in a way that would do honour to any old batchelor. Thalaba will be very rich in notes. . . . .
“There are some Johnobines in Exeter, with whom I have passed some pleasant days. It is the filthiest place in England; a gutter running down the middle of every street and lane. We leave it on Monday week, and I shall rejoice to taste fresh air and feel settled. Exeter, however, has the very best collection of books for sale of any place out of London; and that made by a man who some few years back was worth nothing: Dyer,—not Woolmer, whose catalogue you showed me. Dyer himself is a thinking, extraordinary man, of liberal and extraordinary talents for his circumstances. I congratulate you on being out of bookselling; it did not suit you. Would that we authors had one bookseller at our direction, instead of one bookseller directing so many authors!
“My list of title-pages increases. I have lately made up my mind to undertake one great historical work, the History of Portugal; but for this, and for many other noble plans, I want uninterrupted leisure time, wholly my own, and not frittered away by little periodical employments. . . . .
“God bless you.
