We hope your dear mother remains well. Give my filial love to her. God bless her! I beg my kind love to Ward. God bless you and
STOWEY, Tuesday evening, October 15, 1799.
It is fashionable among our philosophizers to assert the existence of a surplus of misery in the world, which, in my opinion, is no proof that either systematic thinking or unaffected self-observation is fashionable among them. But Hume wrote, and the French imitated him, and we the French, and the French us; and so philosophisms fly to and fro, in series of imitated imitations--shadows of shadows of shadows of a farthing-candle placed between two looking-glasses. For in truth, my dear Southey! I am harassed with the rheumatism in my head and shoulders, not without arm-and-thigh-twitches--but when the pain intermits it leaves my sensitive frame _so_ sensitive! My enjoyments are so deep, of the fire, of the candle, of the thought I am thinking, of the old folio I am reading, and the silence of the silent house is so _most and very_ delightful, that upon my soul! the rheumatism is no such bad thing as _people make for_. And yet I have, and do suffer from it, in much pain and sleeplessness and often sick at stomach through indigestion of the food, which I eat from compulsion. Since I received your former letter, I have spent a few days at Upcott;[209] but was too unwell to be comfortable, so I returned yesterday. Poor Tom![210] he has an adventurous calling. I have so wholly forgotten my geography that I don't know where Ferrol is, whether in France or Spain. Your dear mother must be very anxious indeed. If he return safe, it will have been good. God grant he may!
_Massena!_[211] and what say you of the resurrection and glorification of the Saviour of the East after his trials in the wilderness? (I am afraid that this is a piece of blasphemy; but it was in simple verity such an infusion of animal spirits into me.) Buonaparte! Buonaparte! dear, dear, _dear_ Buonaparte! It would be no bad fun to hear the clerk of the Privy Council read this paragraph before Pitt, etc. "You ill-looking frog-voiced reptile! mind you lay the proper emphasis on the third _dear_, or I'll split your clerkship's skull for you!" Poole ordered a paper. He has _found out_, he says, why the _newspapers_ had become so indifferent to him. _Inventive_ Genius! He begs his kind remembrances to you. In consequence of the news he burns like Greek Fire, under all the wets and waters of this health-and-harvest destroying weather. He flames while his barley smokes. "See!" he says, "how it _grows out again_, ruining the prospects of those who had cut it down!" You are harvest-man enough, I suppose, to understand the metaphor. Jackson[212] is, I believe, out of all doubt a bad man. Why is it, if it be, and I fear it is, why is it that the studies of music and painting are so unfavourable to the human heart? Painters have been commonly very clever men, which is not so generally the case with musicians, but both alike are almost uniformly debauchees. It is superfluous to say how much your account of Bampfylde[213] interested me. Predisposition to madness gave him a cast of originality, and he had a species of _taste_ which only genius could give; but his genius does not appear a _powerful_ or _ebullient_ faculty (nearer to Lamb's than to the Gebir-man [Landor], so I judge from the few specimens _I_ have seen). If you think otherwise, you are right I doubt not. I shall be glad to give Mr. and Mrs. Keenan[214] the right hand of welcome with looks and tones in _fit_ accompaniment. For the wife of a man of genius who sympathises effectively with her husband in his habits and feelings is a _rara avis_ with me; though a vast majority of her own sex and too many of ours will scout her for a _rara piscis_. If I am well enough, Sara and I go to Bristol in a few days. I hope they will not come in the mean time. It is singularly unpleasant to me that I cannot renew our late acquaintances in Exeter without creating very serious uneasinesses at Ottery, Northmore is so preëminently an offensive character to the aristocrats. He sent Paine's books as a present to a clergyman of my brother's acquaintance, a Mr. Markes. This was silly enough....