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British Library, Add MS 30927. Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), II, pp. 306–309 [misdated 5 December 1812].
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.
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Southey’s spelling has not been regularized.
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I am sorry George Taylorx me to find that the poem is not relished, – it is just as impossible to give a taste for works of imagination, as it is
to give a taste for music, & I who am without one shall never quarrel with any body for being without the other. The sort of praise
which I wish Kehama to obtain, & the real value of such works, is expressed in what Turner tells me his wifeof it off at midnight. She could have read it all night, she said, she felt it elevate her
conceptions, & occasion an excitement of mind that made her feel superior to herself. This is there use, to take us out of
ourselves, to carry us into the world of unrealities, to busy us with some thing which is not immediately connected with flesh &
blood; – to elevate rather than to affect, – & to make us perceive our own imaginative powers instead of constantly referring us to
ordinary feelings.
Bedford has seen the review which Scott has written of it,x the moral feeling which pervades it has escaped
him. I do not know whether Bedford will be able to get a paragraph
interpolated touching upon this & showing that there is some difference between a work of high imagination & a story of mere
amusement. –
Since this was written I have had a letter from Scott himself,
telling me of his reviewal, & how hastily he wrote it while the first impression of the poem was fresh upon him, – that he might be
beforehand with the Edinburgh in fixing its character with the public, as far as it is to be fixed by public criticism. – I do not know
who reviewed the Brazil, but I guess it was Reginald Heber.horses breast-flesh. A tambour is an outlandish drum, not such as the soldiers use. Napery implies napkins & tablecloths, either or both. Therefore properly used when a comprehensive term was required.
Harry will tell you that a Broad is the spread of a river into a sheet of water, – someth which is
certainly neither lake nor lagoon. – The mistake about Lutheranism the Reviewer has well accounted for by the constant
presence <use> of the word Luteranos in the Portugueze writers. Araboutan he might have seen in one of the notes is
the indigenous name not of Brazil itself, but of the Brazil-tree.
I am exceedingly tickled with the notion about Sir John Sinclair – alias Sir John Jackass – & the Black ram in the
last article.& They have
also left out what I said about changing the condition of the Clerk, & restoring the old race of Catechists.xx to the Quarterly.
Rickman writes me a very high account indeed of Pasleys
Thursday last I received the box from Bristol, with 20 volumes from Gutch’s catalogue – Oh there was joy in Greta Hall at the arrival. And that same
evening there came two parcels. I was too xxxxxxx happy, – it was happiness enough for three days. One was from Edinburgh, –
a vol. of the Somers Tracts,to xxxx after my own heart. – I have got start enough with Ballantyne to lay the Dutch aside
Many happy returns to you both. – my love to Mary, – & tell the Doctor I am become a convert to his system of drinking beer with pastry –
Bertha still remembers that Aunt Tom used to give her suga-pumm.