2921. Robert Southey to Chauncy Hare Townshend, 16 February 1817⁠* 

Keswick, Feb. 16. 1817.

My dear Chauncey,

If there be any evil connected with poetry, it is that it tends to make us too little masters of ourselves, and counteracts that stoicism, or necessary habit of self-control, of which all of us must sometimes stand in need. I do not mean as to our actions, for there is no danger that a man of good principles should ever feel his inclination and his duty altogether at variance. But as to our feelings. You talk of mourning the loss of your trees, and not enduring to walk where you were wont to see them. I can understand this, and I remember when I was little more than your age saying that

but the less of this the better. We stand in need of all that fortitude can do for us in this changeful world; and the tears are running down my cheeks when I tell you so.

Thomas Clarkson I know well: his book upon Quakerism keeps out of sight all the darker parts of the picture; their littleness of mind, their incorrigible bigotry, and their more than popish interference with the freedom of private actions. [2]  Have you read his history of the Abolition of the Slave Trade? [3]  I have heard it from his own lips, and never was a more interesting story than that of his personal feelings and exertions. I have happened in the course of my life to know three men, each wholly possessed with a single object of paramount importance, – Clarkson, Dr. Bell, and Owen of Lanark, [4]  whom I have only lately known. Such men are not only eminently useful, but eminently happy also; they live in an atmosphere of their own, which must be more like that of the third heaven than of this every-day earth upon which we toil and moil.

I am very ill-pleased with public proceedings. The present Ministry are deficient in every thing except good intentions; and their opponents are deficient in that also. These resignations ought to have been made during the pressure of war, uncalled for, when they would have purchased popularity. [5]  They come now like miserable concessions forced from cowardice, and reap nothing but contempt and insult for their reward. Nor ought they at any time to have resigned part of their official appointments, because the appointments of office are in every instance inadequate to its expenses, in the higher departments of state. They should take money from the sinking fund, and employ it upon public works, or lend it for private ones, stimulating individual industry by assisting it with capital, and thus finding work for idle hands, and food for necessitous families. From the same funds they should purchase waste lands, and enable speculators and industrious poor to colonise them; the property of the lands remaining in the nation, as a source of certain revenue, improving in proportion to the prosperity of the country.

God bless you!

Your affectionate friend.

R.S.