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National Art Library, London, MS Forster 48 D.32 MS 28. Previously published: Charles Cuthbert Southey (ed.), Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, 6 vols (London, 1849–1850), IV, pp. 100–102 [misdated 3 February 1815].
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.
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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
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Your letter gives me great pleasure. Doubt not but that you will be able to keep your promise, & be the happier for
keeping it.
Where shall I send Roderick 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.
You have I think at Tours the grave of Ronsard,
I have begun my Quaker poem,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.