“I was from home for a few days’ absence when your letter arrived. I have seen too many instances of unjust prepossession to be surprised at them now. Much of my early life was embittered by them when I was about your age; and in later years I have been disinherited by two uncles in succession, for no other assignable or possible reason than the caprice of weak minds and misgoverned tempers. In this manner was I deprived of a good property, which the ordinary course of law would have given me. These things never robbed me of a moment’s tranquillity,—never in the slightest degree affected my feelings and spirits, nor ever mingled with my dreams. There is little merit in regarding such things with such philosophy. I suffered no loss, no diminution of any one enjoyment, and should have despised myself if anything so merely external and extraneous could have disturbed me. It is not in the heel, but in the heart, that I am vulnerable; and in the heart I have now been wounded: how deeply. He only who sees the heart can tell.
“Whenever you come I shall rejoice to see you. Do not,
however, wind up your expectations too high. In many things I may, in some
things I must, disappoint the ideal which you have formed. No man has ever
written more faithfully from his heart; but my manners have not the same
habitual unreserve as my pen. A disgust at the professions of
| 194 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 42. |
“I would not have you look on to the University with repugnance or dread. My college years were the least beneficial and the least happy of my life; but this was owing to public and private circumstances, utterly unlike those in which you will be placed. The comfort of being domesticated with persons whom you love, you will miss and feel the want of. In other respects, the change will bring with it its advantages. To enter at college, is taking a degree in life, and graduating as a man. I am not sure that there would be either schools or universities in a Utopia of my creation; in the world as it is, both are so highly useful, that the man who has not been at a public school and at college feels his deficiency as long as he lives. You renew old acquaintances at college; you confirm early intimacies. Probably, also, you form new friendships at an age when they are formed with more judgment, and are therefore likely to endure. And one who has been baptized in the springs of Helicon, is in no danger of falling into vice, in a place where vice appears in the most disgusting form.
“There is a paper of mine in the last Quarterly, upon
the means of bettering the condition of the poor. You will be interested by a
story which it contains of an old woman upon Exmoor. In Wordsworth’s blank-verse it would go to
every heart. Have
| Ætat. 42. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 195 |
