planned, when I had present to my mind, the materials, as well as the scheme, of the Hymns entitled _Spirit_, _Sun_, _Earth_, _Air_, _Water_, _Fire_ and _Man_; and the Epic Poem on what still appears to me the one only fit subject remaining for an epic poem--Jerusalem besieged and destroyed by Titus. TO THE SAME _Reminiscences_ 4 March, 1822. My Dearest Friend, I have been much more than ordinarily unwell for more than a week past--my sleeps worse than my vigils, my nights than my days; --The night's dismay Sadden'd and stunned the intervening day; but last night I had not only a calmer night, without roaming in my dreams through any of Swedenborg's Hells _modérés_; but arose this morning lighter and with a sense of _relief_.... I shall make you smile, as I did dear Mary Lamb, when I say that you sometimes mistake my position. As individual to individual, from my childhood, I do not remember feeling myself either superior or inferior to any human being; except by an act of my own will in cases of real or imagined moral or intellectual superiority. In regard to worldly rank, from eight years old to nineteen, I was habituated, nay, naturalised, to look up to men circumstanced as you are, as my superiors--a large number of our governors, and almost _all_ of those whom we regarded as greater men still, and whom we saw most of, _viz._ our committee governors, were such--and as neither awake nor asleep have I any other feelings than what I had at Christ's Hospital, I distinctly remember that I felt a little flush of pride and consequence--just like what we used to feel at school when the boys came running to us--'Coleridge! here's your friends want you--they are quite _grand_,' or 'It is quite a _lady_'--when I first heard who you were, and laughed at myself for it with that pleasurable sensation that, spite of my sufferings at that school, still accompanies any sudden reawakening of our school-boy feelings and notions. And oh, from sixteen to nineteen what hours of Paradise had Allen and I in escorting the Miss Evanses home on a Saturday, who were then at a milliner's whom we used to think, and who I believe really was, such a nice lady;--and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the pillage of the flower gardens within six miles of town, with Sonnet or Love Rhyme wrapped round the nose-gay. To be feminine, kind, and genteelly (what I should now call neatly) dressed, these were the only things to which my head, heart, or imagination had any polarity, and what I was then, I still am. God bless you and yours. ROBERT SOUTHEY 1774-1843 TO JOSEPH COTTLE _Question of copyrights_ Greta Hall, 20 _April_, 1808. My dear Cottle,...