God love you, dear brother, and your affectionate and grateful
S. T. Coleridge.
XLI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.
December 11, 1794.
My dear Southey,—I sit down to write to you, not that I have anything particular to say, but it is a relief, and forms a very respectable part in my theory of “Escapes from the Folly of Melancholy.” I am so habituated to philosophizing that I cannot divest myself of it, even when my own wretchedness is the subject. I appear to myself like a sick physician, feeling the pang acutely, yet deriving a wonted pleasure from examining its progress and developing its causes.
Your poems and Bowles’ are my only morning companions. “The Retrospect!”[76] Quod qui non prorsus amat et deperit, illum omnes et virtutes et veneres odere! It is a most lovely poem, and in the next edition of your works shall be a perfect one. The “Ode to Romance”[77] is the best of the odes. I dislike that to Lycon, excepting the last stanza, which is superlatively fine. The phrase of “let honest truth be vain” is obscure. Of your blank verse odes, “The Death of Mattathias”[78] is by far the best. That you should ever write another, Pulcher Apollo veta! Musæ prohibete venustæ! They are to poetry what dumb-bells are to music; they can be read only for exercise, or to make a man tired that he may be sleepy. The sonnets are wonderfully inferior to those which I possess of yours, of which that “To Valentine”[79] (“If long and lingering seem one little day The motley crew of travellers among”); that on “The Fire”[80] (not your last, a very so-so one); on “The Rainbow”[81] (particularly the four last lines), and two or three others, are all divine and fully equal to Bowles. Some parts of “Miss Rosamund”[82] are beautiful—the working scene, and that line with which the poem ought to have concluded, “And think who lies so cold and pale below.” Of the “Pauper’s Funeral,”[83] that part in which you have done me the honour to imitate me is by far the worst; the thought has been so much better expressed by Gray. On the whole (like many of yours), it wants compactness and totality; the same thought is repeated too frequently in different words. That all these faults may be remedied by compression, my editio purgata of the poem shall show you.
What! and not one to heave the pious sigh?
Not one whose sorrow-swoln and aching eye,
For social scenes, for life’s endearments fled,
Shall drop a tear and dwell upon the dead?
Poor wretched Outcast! I will sigh for thee,
And sorrow for forlorn humanity!
Yes, I will sigh! but not that thou art come
To the stern Sabbath of the silent tomb:
For squalid Want and the black scorpion Care,
(Heart-withering fiends) shall never enter there.
I sorrow for the ills thy life has known,
As through the world’s long pilgrimage, alone,
Haunted by Poverty and woe-begone,
Unloved, unfriended, thou didst journey on;
Thy youth in ignorance and labour past,
And thy old age all barrenness and blast!
Hard was thy fate, which, while it doom’d to woe,
Denied thee wisdom to support the blow;
And robb’d of all its energy thy mind,
Ere yet it cast thee on thy fellow-kind,
Abject of thought, the victim of distress,
To wander in the world’s wide wilderness.
Poor Outcast! sleep in peace! The winter’s storm
Blows bleak no more on thy unsheltered form!
Thy woes are past; thou restest in the tomb;—
I pause ... and ponder on the days to come.
Now! Is it not a beautiful poem? Of the sonnet, “No more the visionary soul shall dwell,”[84] I wrote the whole but the second and third lines. Of the “Old Man in the Snow,”[85] ten last lines entirely, and part of the four first. Those ten lines are, perhaps, the best I ever did write.
Lovell has no taste or simplicity of feeling. I remarked that when a man read Lovell’s poems he mus cus (that is a rapid way of pronouncing “must curse”), but when he thought of Southey’s, he’d “buy on!” For God’s sake let us have no more Bions or Gracchus’s. I abominate them! Southey is a name much more proper and handsome, and, I venture to prophesy, will be more famous. Your “Chapel Bell”[86] I love, and have made it, by a few alterations and the omission of one stanza (which, though beautiful quoad se, interrupted the run of the thought “I love to see the aged spirit soar”), a perfect poem. As it followed the “Exiled Patriots,” I altered the second and fourth lines to, “So freedom taught, in high-voiced minstrel’s weed;” “For cap and gown to leave the patriot’s meed.”
The last verse now runs thus:—