The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey
Robert Southey to Horace Walpole Bedford, 22 December 1793
“I have accomplished a most arduous task, transcribing
all my verses that appear worth the trouble, except letters; of these I took
one list,—another of my pile of stuff and nonsense,—and a third of
what I have burnt and lost; upon an average 10,000 verses are burnt and lost,
the same number preserved, and 15,000 worthless. Consider that all my letters*
are excluded, and you may judge what waste
* Many of his early letters are written in verse;
often on four sides of folio paper. |
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| 198 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 19. |
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of paper I have occasioned. Three years yet remain before
I can become anyways settled in life, and daring that interval my object must
be to pass each hour in employment. The million would say I must study
divinity; the bishops would give me folios to peruse, little dreaming that to
me every blade of grass and every atom of matter is worth all the Fathers. I
can bear a retrospect; but when I look forward to taking orders, a thousand
dreadful ideas crowd at once upon my mind. Oh, Horace, my views in life are surely very humble; I ask but
honest independence, and that will never be my lot. . . . .
“I have many epistolary themes in embryo. Your
brother’s next will probably be upon the advantages of long noses, and
the recent service mine accomplished in time of need; philosophy and folly take
me by turns. I spent three hours one night last week in cleaving an immense
wedge of old oaken timber without axe, hatchet, or wedges; the chopper was one
instrument, one piece of wood wedged another, and a third made the hammer.
Shad* liked it as well as myself, so
we finished the job and fatigued ourselves. I amused myself, after writing your
letter, with taking profiles; to-day I shall dignify my own and
Shad’s with pasteboard, marbled border, and a
bow of green ribbon, to hang up in my collection room. . . . . The more I see
of this strange world, the more I am convinced that society requires desperate
remedies. The friends I have (and you
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| Ætat. 19. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 199 |
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know me to be cautious in choosing them), are many of them
struggling with obstacles, which never could happen were man what nature
intended him. A torrent of ideas bursts into my mind when I reflect upon this
subject; in the hours of sanguine expectation these reveries are agreeable, but
more frequently the visions of futurity are dark and gloomy, and the only ray
that enlivens the scene beams on America. You see I must fly from thought:
to-day I begin Cowper’s Homer, and write an ode;
to-morrow read and write something else.”
Horace Walpole Bedford (1773-1807)
The younger brother of Grosvenor Charles Bedford; he attended Westminster School, worked
at the British Museum, and corresponded with Robert Southey. He contributed poems to the
Monthly Magazine and the
Annual
Anthology.
William Cowper (1731-1800)
English poet, author of
Olney Hymns (1779),
John
Gilpin (1782), and
The Task (1785); Cowper's delicate
mental health attracted as much sympathy from romantic readers as his letters, edited by
William Hayley, did admiration.
Elizabeth Tyler (1739-1821)
Robert Southey's aunt, his mother's elder half-sister, with whom he spent much time as a
child.
Shadrach Weeks (1774 c.-1795 fl.)
The boyhood friend of Robert Southey; he was the servant of Southey's Aunt Tyler,
afterwards recruited for the Pantisocracy project.
