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Mitchell Library, Glasgow. 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.
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Your book,
I give you joy of the success of your labours, late tho it be & long delayed, – & of the extension of the New
System, which having once taken root must send forth xxx forth its branches & suckers on every side. Yet I confess that
I shall never be satisfied till I see it adopted into our political system, & established by the legislature wherever its authority
extends. This I think might have been expected from Mr Perceval, & on this
account as well as on many others I never call to mind his death without regretting it as a great national calamity.
Your Grasmere, or rather Rydale
friends as they ought now to be called, are gone pleasuring into Scotland, leaving Miss Wordsworth to keep house with the two younger children.
Of late I have been almost exclusively employed in poetry. my great poem,not approach him
but came instead with this “elaborate lay
The thoughtful work of many a studious year”
A complimentary ode
You will smile to hear that the mischievous turn of affairs in the Princes family should have produced any effects on me. Relying upon the marriage of
the Princess Charlotte with the Prince of Orange, I determined like a good boy at school to be in time with my task, & having
formed a plan of some originality much to my own liking, which would have been divided into three parts entitled The Proem, The Dream,
& L’Envoy, had got xxxx more than half <nearly> thro the second when the match was broken off
& my poor poem adjourned sine die.
Edith & Mrs Lovell desire their kindest remembrances. Mrs Coleridge & Sara are visiting at Netherhall, – for the sake of sea bathing.