I raise potatoes and all manner of vegetables, have an orchard, and shall raise corn with the spade, enough for my family. We have two pigs, and ducks and geese. A cow would not answer the keep: for we have whatever milk we want from T. Poole. God bless you and your affectionate
MY DEAR COTTLE,--I am sojourning for a few days at Racedown, the mansion of our friend Wordsworth, who has received Fox's "Achmed." He returns you his acknowledgments, and presents his kindliest respects to you. I shall be home by Friday--not to-morrow--but the next Friday. If the "Ode on the Departing Year" be not reprinted, please to _omit_ the lines from "When shall scepter'd slaughter cease," to "For still does Madness roam on Guilt's bleak dizzy height," inclusive.[160] The first epode is to end at the words "murderer's fate." Wordsworth admires my tragedy, which gives me great hopes. Wordsworth has written a tragedy himself. I speak with heartfelt sincerity, and (I think) unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself _a little man by his side_, and yet do not think myself the less man than I formerly thought myself. His drama is absolutely wonderful. You know I do not commonly speak in such abrupt and unmingled phrases, and therefore will the more readily believe me. There are in the piece those _profound_ touches of the human heart which I find three or four times in "The Robbers" of Schiller, and often in Shakespeare, but in Wordsworth there are no _inequalities_. T. Poole's opinion of Wordsworth is that he is the greatest man he ever knew; I coincide.
It is not impossible, that in the course of two or three months I may see you. God bless you, and
Thursday.--Of course, with the lines you omit the notes that relate to them.
MR. COTTLE, Bookseller, High Street, Bristol.
DEAR SOUTHEY,--You are acting kindly in your exertions for Chatterton's sister; but I doubt the success. Chatterton's or Rowley's poems were never popular. The very circumstance which made them so much talked of, their _ancientness_, prevented them from being generally read, in the degree, I mean, that Goldsmith's poems or even Rogers' thing upon memory has been. The sale was _never_ very great. Secondly, the London Edition and the Cambridge Edition, which are now both of them the property of London booksellers, are still in hand, and these booksellers will "hardly exert their interest for a rival." _Thirdly, these are bad times._ Fourthly, all who are sincerely zealous for Chatterton, or who from knowledge of her are interested in poor Mrs. Newton, will come forwards first, and if others should drop in but slowly, Mrs. Newton will either receive no benefit at all from those her friends, or one so long procrastinated, from the necessity of waiting for the complement of subscribers, that it may at last come too late. For these reasons I am almost inclined to think a _subscription_ simply would be better. It is unpleasant to cast a damp on anything; but that benevolence alone is likely to be beneficent which _calculates_. If, however, you continue to entertain higher hopes than I, believe me, I will shake off my sloth, and use my best muscles in gaining subscribers. I will certainly write a preliminary essay, and I will _attempt_ to write a poem on the life and death of Chatterton, but the Monody _must not be reprinted_. Neither this nor the Pixies' Parlour would have been in the second edition, but for dear Cottle's solicitous importunity. Excepting the last eighteen lines of the Monody, which, though deficient in chasteness and severity of diction, breathe a pleasing spirit of romantic feeling, there are not five lines in either poem which might not have been written by a man who had lived and died in the self-same St. Giles' cellar, in which he had been first suckled by a drab with milk and gin. The Pixies is the least disgusting, because the subject leads you to expect nothing, but on a life and death so full of heart-going _realities_ as poor Chatterton's, to find such shadowy nobodies as cherub-winged _Death_, Trees of _Hope_, bare-bosomed _Affection_ and simpering _Peace_, makes one's blood circulate like ipecacuanha. But so it is. A young man by strong feelings is impelled to write on a particular subject, and this is all his feelings do for him. They set him upon the business and then they leave him. He has such a high idea of what poetry ought to be, that he cannot conceive that such things as his natural emotions may be allowed to find a place in it; his learning therefore, his fancy, or rather conceit, and all his powers of buckram are put on the stretch. It appears to me that strong feeling is not so requisite to an author's being profoundly pathetic as taste and good sense.