“Yesterday I received your note enclosing the specimen of your poems. I have perused that specimen, but my advice cannot be comprised in a few words.
“A literary, as well as a medical opinion, Mr. Elliott, must needs be blindly given,
unless the age and circumstances of the person who requires it are known. When
I advised Henry White to publish a
second volume of poems, it was because he had fixed his heart upon a University
education, and this seemed to be a feasible method of raising funds for that
end; his particular circumstances rendering that prudent which would otherwise
have been very much the reverse. For poetry is not a marketable article unless
there be something strange or
| Ætat. 35. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 213 |
“You are probably a young man, Sir, and it is plain from this specimen that you possess more than one of those powers which form the poet, and those in a far more than ordinary degree. Whether your plans of life are such as to promise leisure for that attention (almost it might be said that devotement), without which no man can ever become a great poet, you yourself must know. If they should, you will in a very few years have outgrown this poem, and would then be sorry to see it in print, irrecoverably given to the public, because you would feel it to be an inadequate proof of your own talents. If, on the other hand, you consider poetry as merely an amusement or an ornament of youth, to be laid aside in riper years for the ordinary pursuits of the world, with still less indulgence will you then regard the printed volume, for you will reckon it among the follies of which you are ashamed. In either case it is best not to publish.
“It is far, very far from my wish to discourage or
depress you. There is great promise in this specimen; it has all the faults
which I should wish to see in the writings of a young poet, as the surest
indications that he has that in him which will enable him
| 214 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 35. |
| Ætat. 35. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 215 |
“The sum of my advice is—do not publish this poem; but if you can without grievous imprudence afford to write poetry, continue so to do, because, hereafter, you will write it well. As yet you have only green fruit to offer; wait a season, and there will be a fair and full gathering when it is ripe.
