Material from the Romantic Circles Website may not be downloaded, reproduced or disseminated in any manner without authorization unless it is for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and/or classroom use as provided by the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended.
Unless otherwise noted, all Pages and Resources mounted on Romantic Circles are copyrighted by the author/editor and may be shared only in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Except as expressly permitted by this statement, redistribution or republication in any medium requires express prior written consent from the author/editors and advance notification of Romantic Circles. Any requests for authorization should be forwarded to Romantic Circles:>
By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the following conditions:
Users are not permitted to download these texts and images in order to mount them on their own servers. It is not in our interest or that of our users to have uncontrolled subsets of our holdings available elsewhere on the Internet. We make corrections and additions to our edited resources on a continual basis, and we want the most current text to be the only one generally available to all Internet users. Institutions can, of course, make a link to the copies at Romantic Circles, subject to our conditions of use.
Royal Institution, London, Davy MSS. Previously published: John Davy (ed.), Fragmentary Remains, Literary and Scientific, of Sir Humphry Davy, Bart. (London, 1858), pp. 39–41.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.
Because of web browser variability, all hyphens have been typed on the U.S. keyboard.
Dashes have been rendered as a variable number of hyphens to give a more exact rendering of their length.
Southey’s spelling has not been regularized.
Writing in other hands appearing on these manuscripts has been indicated as such, the content recorded in brackets.
& has been used for the ampersand sign.
£ has been used for £, the pound sign
All other characters, those with accents, non-breaking spaces, etc., have been encoded in HTML entity decimals.
Massena!the which unfortunately I shall only be able imperfectly to understand. Science I have none, except in Anatomy. knowing
little but terms.
Thalaba the Destroyer,
For the Anthology also I have done something. Some Songs characteristic of the different tribes of
American-Indiansan diff
division of some length – in the after volumesx
Tobin
I am revolutionizing here – organizing two beggarly cottages into one dwelling house. in the course of a fortnight we shall have a comfortable habitation to enter – small but big enough to hold us & any friend who may think it worth while to visit us. there is a garden quite large enough & quite empty, so that I may follow my own taste in filling it – the ground is very good & has long been fattening in fallowness. here I mean to take much of my necessary quantum of exercise.
The Brutus of your plan I suppose to be the fabulous settler of Britain.mean have chosen the more elevated & republican theme of Rome
delivered – & the expulsion of the Tarquins.name xx germ fermenting in some recess of my brain, by one day by developement & accretion to assume a mature shape & size. the history is so utterly
unaccountable that I can form no hypothesis probable enough for poetry.
Will you be good enough to send me some foxglove for my mother
& likewise some of the asthma-drops, that she may take when her cough is removed? Danvers will convey them to me. – I shall not visit Bristol till I come to superintend the printing of Thalaba – w[MS torn]
must first be written. in the spring however this will bring me there – & I shall work perhaps with more eager industry that I may
the sooner see the old city where I <have> ever had some person to remember with affection. Edith is tolerable – & desires to be remembered to you. My brother – whom you once saw – is a prisoner at Ferrol.Sylph, on which Tom Southey
was serving, had been captured and was at the Spanish port of Ferrol.
near Ringwood.