2549. Robert Southey to Walter Savage Landor, 5 February 1815 ⁠* 

Keswick. 5 Feb^y. 1815

Your letter gives me great pleasure. Doubt not but that you will be able to keep your promise, & be the happier for keeping it. [1] 

Where shall I send Roderick [2]  to meet you when you cross the channel, or shall I direct it to Mrs Landor x & where? Xx xx x Before she sets out, if you wait for spring weather, it will be reprinted in a more portable form than its present cumbrous quarto.

In one of the first books which I published a crazy compositor took into his head to correct the proofs after me; & this he did so assiduously that it cost me no fewer than sixteen cancels to get rid of the most intolerable of blunders. [3]  One of his principles was that in printing verse, wherever the lines were so indented that two in succession did not begin in the same perpendicular, there was to be a full stop at the end of the former; – & upon this principle he punctuated my verses. I discovered it at last in the printing office upon enquiring how it happened that the very faults for which a leaf was cancelled appeared most perseveringly in the reprint: the man then came forward, quite in a fit of madness, told me I should have made a pretty book of it if he had not corrected it for me, – & it was as much as the master of the office could do to pacify him. [4] 

You have I think at Tours the grave of Ronsard, [5]  – who would have been a great poet if he had not been a Frenchman. I have read his works in those odds & ends of time which can be afforded to such reading, & have so much respect for him, Frenchman as he was, that I shall not visit Tours without enquiring for his grave. Never did man more boldly promise immortality to himself; never did man more ardently aspire after it: & no Frenchman has ever impressed me with an equal sense of power. But poetry of the higher order is as impossible in that curst language as it is in Chinese. – And this reminds me of a certain M. Le Mierre, [6]  Interprete – Traducteur &c – who has written to tell me that many of my compatriotes distingués par leur gout et leurs connoissances [7]  have spoken to him with great eulogies of my poem of Roderick, – whereupon he, not having seen the poem has resolved to translate it, & found a bookseller who will undertake to print the translation. – I wrote him as courtesy required a civil reply, but expressed my doubts whether such a poem would accord with the taste of a French public, & recommended him, if he should persist in his intention when he had read the book, to render it in prose rather <than> in verse.

I have begun my Quaker poem, [8]  & written the first book in irregular rhyme, a measure which allows of a lower key than any structure of rhymeless verse; & may be laid aside where the passion requires it for dialogue. The principal character is rather a Seeker (in the language of that day) than a Quaker, – a son of Goffe the Kings Judge, [9]  a godson of Cromwell, [10]  – a friend of Milton, – a companion of William Penn. [11]  The plan is sufficiently made out, – but I have no longer that ardour of execution which I possessed twenty years ago. I have the disheartening conviction that my best is done, & that to add to the bulk of my works will not be to add to their estimation. Doubtless I shall fini go on with the poem, & compleat it if I live, but it will be to please others, not myself; & will be so long in progress that in all likelihood I shall never begin another. – You see I am not without those autumnal feelings which your stanza expresses; & yet the decline of life has joys of delights of its own, – its autumnal odours & its sunset [MS torn] & hues hues. My disposition is invincibly chearful & this alone would make me a happy man, if I were not so from the tenour of my life: yet I doubt whether the strictest Carthusian has the thought of death more habitually in his mind.

I hope to see you in the autumn; & will, if it be possible.

God bless you

RS.