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.
MS untraced; text is taken from Charles Cuthbert Southey (ed.), Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, 6 vols (London, 1849–1850) . Previously published: Charles Cuthbert Southey (ed.), Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, 6 vols (London, 1849–1850), V, pp. 78–80 [in part].
These letters were edited with the assistance of Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt
All quotation marks and apostrophes have been changed: " for “," for ”, ' for ‘, and ' for ’.
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.
I received your parcel this afternoon, and thank you for the book, for the dedication, and for
the sonnet.
The stages of your life have passed regularly and happily, so that you have had leisure to mark them with precision, and to feel them, and reflect upon them. With me these transitions were of a very different character; they came abruptly, and, when I left the University, it was to cast myself upon the world, with a heart full of romance, and a head full of enthusiasm. No young man could have gone more widely astray, according to all human judgement; and yet the soundest judgement could not have led me into any other way of life in which I should have had such full cause to be contented and thankful.
The world is now before you; but you have neither difficulties to struggle with, nor dangers to apprehend. All that the heart of a wise man can desire is within your reach. And you are blest with a disposition which will keep you out of public life, in which my advice to those whom I loved would be, – never to engage.
Your Cambridge wit is excellent of its kind. I am not acquainted with Coleridge of King’s; but somewhat intimately so with one of his brothers, now at the bar, and likely to rise very high in his profession. I know no man of whose judgement and principles I have a higher opinion. They are a remarkably gifted family, and may be expected to distinguish themselves in many ways.
The Wordsworths spoke of you with great pleasure upon their return from Cambridge.He was with me lately. His thoughts and mine have for some time unconsciously been
travelling in the same direction; for while I have been sketching a brief history of the English Church, and the
systems which it has subdued or struggled with, he has been pursuing precisely the same subject in a series of
sonnets, to which my volume will serve for a commentary, as completely as if it had been written with that
intent.
Are you going abroad? Or do you wait till the political atmosphere seems to promise settled
weather? God knows when that will be! For myself I know not what to wish for, when on the one side the old
Governments will not attempt to amend anything, and on the other the Revolutionists are for destroying every thing.
Spain is in a deplorable state, which must lead to utter anarchy.in terrorem
God bless you!