3290. Robert Southey to Walter Savage Landor, 7 May 1819⁠* 

Keswick. 7 May. 1819.

Your Ode has been put in the right course; – I found means of getting it delivered to the Swedish Ambassador, & he will transmit it to Sweden [1] . This I should have told you sooner, if I had been in spirits for writing. It is now ten weeks since a son was born to me, & it is only within the last three days, that I have been free from serious anxiety concerning his Mother. Now I begin to breathe & hope all will be well.

One of my brothers, a Sea-Captain with a wife & six children, [2]  is come to live within four miles of me, – in Newlands, – between this place & Buttermere. This adds much to my enjoyments, & gives me moreover a motive to wholesome exercise which I might otherwise not be sufficiently disposed to take. He has some cows there, upon poor land; & at the bottom of his fields runs a beck, in which there are <is> the most delicious bathing, – natural baths of all depths, & seats where you may act the river God, & let the stream flow under your arms, or over your shoulders; – no luxury is like it in a hot summers day, & such days are already beginning.

Wordsworth has just published a little poem to the tune of his Idiot Boy, & of the same pitch; – with fine things in it, & a prologue which you will be much pleased with. [3]  I told him what you said of his poems, & he desires to send you this, when an opportunity offers. It shall travel with my books when they are publi ready, but you must tell me how to direct them. I am printing the last chapter of Brazil, – containing a view of the state of the country at the time when the history concludes, – that is, when the Court removed thither. [4]  Of the new States which are rising in the world, I think Brazil is likely to be the greatest. It is less likely to fall asunder than Yankee-land, & tho the Brazilians are woefully behind the Yankees in every thing else, they have a sense of honour, generally prevailing among them, in which the Anglo Americans seem to have renounced. Besides the tendency of Brazil at this time is towards improvement in every thing; – the tendency in America is to level down every thing to the dead flat of vulgar ignorance: they wish to have no other Master of Arts than he who has the Ready Reckoner at his fingers end. [5] 

I have seen lately three young American travellers, [6]  all singularly accomplished men, from New England, – two of them indeed among the most accomplishd men in fine literature whom it was ever my fortune to meet. But such men who would do honour to Old England, (& for that reason regard the mother country with admiration & reverence) are as rare in America, as men of old Roman virtue are in the country wherein you are sojourning. Every thing tends to make the Americans merely ephemeral in their thoughts & feelings. They have no classical learning, – no ancestry, no antiquities, – Our French neighbours were of are fond of comparing us to the Carthaginians, – the parallel would suit the Americans better, – for their commercial, military, & naval skill, – their boundless ambition, – their dishonesty, & their total want of every thing that is truly great & glorious literature. New England is infinitely the best part of America, – there the people are becoming more English in their feelings, – & it is not a little curious that in that country the first attempts should be made for introducing an Established Ch religious Establishment. [7] 

I have made some progress in my New England poem, & like what I have done. [8]  The swarm of imitative poets in this age is really surprizing, & the success with which they imitate their models would be surprizing also, if it did not prove that there can be no great difficulty in producing what may be imitated so well. Morbid feelings, atrocious principles, exaggerated characters & incidents of monstrous & disgusting horror, make up the fashionable compound, – the more unEnglish, unchristian & immoral the better, provided it be in slavered over with a froth of philosophy. – I have fewer imitators than any other poet of any notoriety, – the reason is probably that I am less fashionable, – & perhaps also that I am less a mannerist. To make up for this I am favoured with more abuse than all the rest collectively, – Wordsworth comes in for a pretty large share, & very often we go together. If my name be found in such company hereafter, it will be enough.

You are mentioned in a newspaper essay this week (the Westmorland Gazette) as the English poet who most resembles Goethe, but as infinitely his superior. [9]  I do not know enough of Goethe to judge how far this assertion may be right, – but a writer who estimated you so justly seems must have been capable of estimating him. Oh that you had been as incapable of writing Latin verse as I am!

God bless you

RS.