“Your ‘Mount’s Bay,’ my dear Davy, disappointed me in its length. I expected more, and wished more, because what there is is good; there is a certain swell, an elevation in the flow of the blank verse, which, I do not know how, produces an effect like the fulness of an organ-swell upon the feeling. I have felt it from the rhythm of Milton, and sometimes of Akenside, a pleasure wholly independent from that derived from the soul of the poetry, arising from the beauty of the body only. I believe a man who did not understand a word of it would feel pleasure and emotion at hearing such lines read with the tone of a poet.... “I must not press the subject of poetry upon you, only do not lose the feeling and the habit of seeing all things with a poet’s eye; at Bristol you have a good society, but not a man who knows anything of poetry. Dr. Beddoes’ taste is very pessimism. Cottle only likes what his friends and himself write. Every person fancies himself competent to pronounce upon the merits of a poem, and yet no trade requires so long an apprenticeship, or involves the necessity of such multifarious knowledge.... “At Lymouth I saw Tobin’s friend Williams who opened upon me with an account of the gaseous oxide. I had the advantage of him, having felt what he it seems had only seen. Lymouth where he is fixed is certainly the most beautiful place I have seen in England, so beautiful that all the after-scenes come flat and uninteresting. The Valley of Stones is about half a mile distant, a strange and magnificent place, which ought to have filled the whole neighbourhood with traditions of giants, devils, and magicians, but I could find none, not even a lie preserved. I know too little of natural history to hypothesize upon the cause of this valley; it appeared to me that nothing but water could have so defleshed and laid bare the bones of the earth--that any inundation which could have overtopped these heights must have deluged the kingdom; but the opposite hills are clothed with vegetable soil and verdure, therefore the cause must have been partial--a waterspout might have occasioned it perhaps--and there my conjectures rested, or rather took a new direction to the pre-Adamite kings, the fiends who married Diocletian’s fifty daughters--their giant progeny, old Merlin and the builders of the Giant’s Causeway. “For the next Anthology I project a poem on our Clifton rocks; the scenery is fresh in my sight, and these kind of poems derive a more interesting cast as _recollections_ than as immediate pictures. Farewell. Yours truly, “ROBERT SOUTHEY.” * * * * * “Keswick, Friday Evening, _July 25, 1800_.