“I am out of humour with myself respecting Lord Colchester*, as if from shyness on my part there had been a want of due attention to him. He called on his arrival to thank me for having made all arrangements for his movement in this neighbourhood, and came just as I had a party assembling for dinner; and having that party I did not, of course, ask him for the evening, which otherwise I should have done. The next day I went to his inn a little after seven in the evening, meaning, if he had not been wearied with the round which he had taken, to have asked him to drink tea in a pleasanter room than the Inn affords. But he proved to be at dinner, for which reason I merely left my card; and then, because his rank stood in the way, and made me fearful of appearing to press myself upon him, I did not write a note to invite him up, which I should have done had he been Mr. Abbott. The next day brought me a very obliging note from him, after his departure. He has had from us good directions and commissariat services, but not that personal attention which I wished to have paid him.
“In this way, through a constitutional bashfulness, which the publicity of authorship has not over-
* Mr. Rickman had written to tell him that Lord Colchester was going to the Lakes, and intended calling upon him, and requesting him to give him some information as to the best mode of seeing the country. |
| 304 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 53. |
“I believe, my dear R., that most men by the time they have reached our age are ready, whatever their pursuits may have been, to agree with Solomon, that they end in vanity. If they are not mere clods, muckworms, they come to this conclusion,—wealth, reputation, power, are alike unsatisfactory when they are attained, alike insufficient to content the heart of man, which is ever discontented till it has found its rest. This it finds in the prospect of immortality, in the anticipation of a state where there shall be no change, except such as is implied in perpetual progression. When we have learnt to look forward with that hope, then we look back upon the past without regret, and are able to bear the present, however heavy and painful sometimes may be its pressure. There is no other support for a broken spirit; no other balm for a wounded heart.
“You have overworked yourself, which I have ever been
afraid of doing. The wonder is that you have not suffered more severely and
irremediably; and that while so working you should have yet been
| Ætat. 53. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 305 |
“What you have to do is to extricate yourself from all unnecessary and ungrateful business, and give the time which you may thus gain to more healthful and genial pursuits,—books, to which inclination would lead you, and, above all, travelling. I wish you could have gone with Henry Taylor and his father—a man whom you would especially like; still more do I wish you would come here and take a course of mountaineering,—upon which I should very gladly enter, and which would be to my bodily benefit. And then we might talk at leisure and at will over the things of this world and the next.
“God bless you, my dear friend!
