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.
Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Lett. c. 25. Not previously published.
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.
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.
You are right about days instead of years, – & I cannot now tell for what
reason I was chose to avoid the repetition. Yet there must have been some, which perhaps will strike my eye or my ear in
correcting the proof.
Exalted as here used has a foreign shade of meaning akin to Enthusiastic. war I wore – was
miswritten, it should be wars.
Does the prospect of future danger heighten the sense of present security you ask. The danger here described is
distant, & doubtful: & evils of those this degree I think have that effect. The man who means to rise at eight on a
cold morning, & wakes at seven, enjoys his bed the more for the prospect of leaving it.
You will find by a note upon the scale-armour that I have gone as far back as possible for authority, – which is to
Roland & Oliver.
I write bends instead of bent,s is required in that place for the sake of euphony, to smooth the line. As for the tenses it is mere pedantry to
suppose that they may not be used at libitum where no possible ambiguity can be produced by passing <going> from an
indefinite-perfect to a past, to a passing present.
What is a Cat looking out of a window – most like? – Like a Cat looking in – says the old jest. But my simily is not of
this description.here it is that the simily fails in philosophical, but not
in poetical truth.
I do not comprehend what you mean by asking if Lines 43–4 Book 13, are not rather dogmatick.
By aiming the point of the scymitar against the neck I meant precisely to describe the xxxx way of beginning
to behead by a push.
62. The battle is over, & if you recollect that a valley in a mountainous country is the scene, you will see that a
little eminence by the way side is just where Chiefs who had done their work should take their stand at such a
time. To go higher would be to climb a mountain.
Asturias is the antecedent. By duty I understand what every man in the common routine of life is called upon to perform
– by virtue (in this place) that higher the voluntary discharge of it when there would be no positive crime in the omission.
– This is not expressed with due precision – but you will understand me, & I am too much in haste to hunt for more accurate
language. I meant to imply <say> that martyrdom political or religious is not to be demanded of a man, – & that in
the then state of Spain they who took arms with Pelayo must be such men as were volunteers for it. – The last half line of the speech
is to my ear & feeling a worthy finish; & in dramatic verse, which this is, the break in the measure adds to its rapidity &
passion.
_____
The necessity of the 15th Book you will see in the progress of the story wherein Florinda must
rejoin her father. The dog also has his use. If you do not like his anglicised name I have no alternative but to borrow one from Ovid,
& suppose the Romans left it there.
_____
You have here a book <the 16th> which is almost wholly descriptive. The reason th
is that this valley & this xxxx xx is the scene of the final battle: the description is as much to the life as it can be
made from books, – which are however tolerably minute. I have spangled the book with a few classical & other allusions.
I am disappointed at the nonappearance of both my articles in this Quarterly,th! – 20 or 26 will be the extent.
How is your father? this will be a trying month for him. I think often of him & of you with a concern which you will very well understand.