The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey
Robert Southey to Thomas Southey, 11 February 1805
“It is not possible that my letters can give you more
pleasure than yours give me. You have always reason to suppose that all is well
with me when you hear nothing to the contrary. I am only exposed to the common
accidents of life, but you are in the way of battle and slaughter, pestilence
and hurricanes, And every letter that arrives from you relieves me from a
certain kind of apprehension. . . . . As this letter was not finished at a
heat, it has lain two or three weeks; to own the truth fairly, I had such a
fear about me of the yellow fever, because you mentioned indisposition on the
night preceding the date of your last, that I had not heart to go on with ![]()
| Ætat. 29. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 257 |
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it. Once I received a letter from a poor fellow three
months after he was dead,—it excited a most painful feeling; and it is
little less unpleasant to address one to a person whom you fear may not be
among the living. However, yours of Dec 4. has just come to hand. You do not
tell me whether the fever is out of the ship; but I conclude it must almost
have done its work, and will go out like a fire when it no longer finds
anything it can destroy. I have a sort of theory about such diseases which I do
not understand myself, but somebody or other will, some of these days. They are
so far analogous to vegetables as that they take root, grow, ripen, and decay.
Those which are eruptive, blossom and seed; for the pustule of the smallpox,
&c. is, to all intents and purposes, the flower of the disease, or the
fructification by which it is perpetuated. Now these diseases, like vegetables,
choose their own soil,—some plants like clay, others sand, others chalk;
so the yellow fever will not take root in a negro, nor the yaws in a white man.
There is a hint for a new theory; you will see the truth of the analogy at
once, and I can ho more explain it than you can, but so it is. . . . . We have
been dreadfully shocked here by the fate of Wordsworth’s brother, captain of the Abergavenny East Indiaman, which has just been lost in Portland
Bay; almost as shocking as the Halsewell—300
lives. . . . . Bonaparte wants peace; a continental war is a far more probable
event. What will become of Portugal, heaven knows: and till that be decided, I
can as ![]()
| 258 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 29. |
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little tell what will become of me. Meantime I
shall continue to work hard and to economise.
“God bless you!
Yours very affectionately,
R. S.”
Thomas Southey (1777-1838)
The younger brother of Robert Southey; he was a naval captain (1811) and afterwards a
Customs officer. He published
A Chronological History of the West
Indies (1828).
John Wordsworth (1772-1805)
The brother of William Wordsworth, an East India Company captain, he was drowned in the
wreck of the Earl of Abergavenny near Weymouth.
