and good one; five long hours' work, all of which he shall have to recopy. "Ah me! this reminds me that you could not make out my Latin verses! I wonder whether I shall be able myself to read my letter to Burdett when I see it to-morrow morning." Perhaps he was not, for all trace of that production has vanished. But the mention of the Latin verses may take us to other parts of the correspondence of the friends, in which only matters of literature were discussed between them.

VI. ON KEHAMA AND RODERICK.

The portions of letters contained in this section will relate chiefly to the poems which, resumed at Landor's instigation, Southey carried on to their completion steadily amid his other labors; and they shall be such as I hope may still be interesting, or in some way characteristic of either friend. There will at least be no repetition, in any of the extracts given, of what has before appeared in print.

FROM BATH, 11TH JANUARY, 1809.

"Since my return from Spain I have hardly read anything else than the Cid and Kehama. It will be long before we have such warriors as the one, and such poems as the other. I never felt the same anxiety to see the whole of any work as of this.

'Twice hast thou set thy footstep:
Where shall the third be planted?'

If the next parcel is equal to the two former, the riches of the East will vanish from the grasp of future poets. I am not destined to be a great reader. Many hours have I passed, at different times, over these lines:

"There are some things in our language which want fixing by some convention among the higher powers. Shakespeare and Milton write toward and toward. But improperly: for we say invariably backward, forward, and we ought also to say toward. I have in general given more attention to language than to anything else; but I shall always think myself wrong in Bent towards them,' &c., at the end of a book in Gebir. We possess a high advantage in the double termination of the third person singular, -es and eth. The former should never precede an s, nor the latter a th. To this rule I would adhere both in poetry and prose. I hear no more of Mr. Coleridge's new project." [The Friend: of which the first number did not appear till June.] 66 Indeed I converse with no liter

ary men here, nor do I know for certain whether here are any."

AN OBJECTION, FEBRUARY, 1809.

"When I can read what you send of Kehama more calmly and dispassionately, which I would hardly wish to do, I will search it through and

through to discover the slightest of its imperfections. None of your enemies shall be more zealous in the labor. One line not only displeased but disturbed me,

'Eye hath not seen nor painter's hand portrayed.'

I have an insuperable hatred to such words as painter' and 'portray' in grave heroic poetry: add to which, if 'eye hath not seen,' it is superfluous to say the rest. The first words are serious and solemn, the last put one in mind of the Exhibition and the French. Take care how you 'o'erlay this poem with ornament!' It is now suis pollens opibus, as Lucretius says of the Gods. I know not whether we shall find any one in any language so full of originality and fancy. You will find fewer things to embellish than to correct, and very few of these. Remember that I am to have something to console me for not being able to write it. I am to be the typographer."

SOUTHEY'S REPLY.

"Your draft was put in circulation. Kehama would never have been resumed had it not been for you. It had lain untouched for five years, and so it would have remained. You stung me to the resolution of going on; and I am not sure whether the main pleasure which I have felt in proceeding has not been the anticipation of addressing it to you and saying so. It is announced through the customary channel of magazines as in considerable forwardness. I am going to Edinburgh in May, and for a week or ten days shall be Walter Scott's guest. Kehama will then (God willing) be completed: and I think Scott will enable me to ascertain in what manner it may most advantageously be published.... It has however cost me no expense of time. I have fairly won it, as Lincolnshire speculators win estates from the sea; - my daily work has been done just as if no such composition was in my thoughts, without the slightest interruption. If therefore nothing be got by its sale, it has not made me the poorer.. I am so much the happier for having written it, so much the richer as a poet, and in fact have received from you half as much as the profits of an edition would be when shared by a publisher. Its success (I speak solely of its market success) will only thus far influence me, that a good sale would make me afford more time for other such poems, which I should then publish as fast as they were written. Its still-birth (which I entirely expect) will merely make me write others as this is written, in the early morning hours; which I shall continue to do as long as the unabated power is in me, and leave them behind as post-obits to my children, in perfect confidence that such manuscripts will prove good and secure property hereafter. At Edinburgh I shall feel my way about the publication. When the obnoxious line was written, I thought of better painters than the exhibitioners, — of those whose creative powers entitle them to be mentioned anywhere. It is however an ugly word, because it always reminds one of the house-painter. I set a black mark upon the line. Your remarks shall be well weighed, and every passage which I cannot entirely justify shall be altered. Do not however be at the trouble of criticising the first portion which you received, for that has been greatly altered since by rhyming most of those parts which were rhymeless, -a task which is yet to be completed."

Landor's former objection to the rhymeless metres had led to this concession from his friend; and speaking of it in his next letter he

says that, apart from his admiration of the higher beauties of the poem, the facility displayed in the new rhymes had taken him greatly by surprise. "It never was equalled. New rhymes in general seem strange; and nine people out of ten, scholars I mean and literatists, imagine them forced, not chosen. No weakness or absurdity is half so much scoffed and scouted as a new or unusual rhyme." From the same letter we learn that he had been lately

READING EURIPIDES.

"I believe I shall remain at Bath a good while longer. I am reading what I had not read before of Euripides. Between ourselves, in most of his tragedies there is more preachment than poetry. I was surprised and mortified to find it so. How, in the name of Heaven, could the Athenians endure on the stage, so deplorably mutilated and metamorphosed, those heroes whom they had followed in the vigor of unsophisticated life through the wide and ever-varying regions of the Iliad and Odyssea? A hero, penned up and purgatorized in this middle state, is fitted to become a Monseigneur bien poudré among the mesdames and waiting-maids, and patch-boxes of Racine. I have been reading also Twining's translation, notes, &c. of Aristotle's Poetics. I attempted the original once. It appeared to me, what I suppose it is not, tautological though concise. I found it too hard for me. At that time my teeth were better, though my digestion not so good. I could reach the construction, but I could not analyze the parts."

Very characteristic was Southey's next letter, in which he described Kehama as approaching completion so rapidly that already his thoughts were busy with what its successor should be. Two more sections only, he said, would finish what he had in hand; and he was eager for Landor's advice as to the metre most advisable for his next poem, which should certainly be on the founder of the Spanish monarchy, Pelayo. He could not but feel the force of views formerly expressed to him by Landor, that what in itself was excellent would be best in blank verse, but that everything below excellence would borrow something from rhyme. As to the publication of Kehama, Scott had failed as yet to make the hoped-for arrangement.

"His bookseller, Ballantyne, was here lately, and his advice to me was to sell the copyright of whatever I wrote, because, he said, booksellers repaid themselves by selling off shares of the copyright. More persons were thus interested in the success of the book, and consequently greater efforts were made to sell it. This may be true, but it is a truth which is not applicable to my case; for it is utterly impossible that this poem should become popular now. The copyright, therefore, is worth little or nothing at present; and yet if it be as good as I believe it to be, there will come a time when it will have its reward. The better way, I think, will be to print it as a pocket volume, and let it take its chance. Two hundred pages will hold the poem, and about a hundred and fifty more the notes."

A little delay is still interposed; improvements have to be made in the metre, and lines to be altered or added here and there; but at

last, on the 26th November, 1809, he is able to announce to Landor that on the preceding day he had finished Kehama. He did not expect that it would meet with more admirers than Gebir, but should be thoroughly satisfied if they whom it did meet with admired it as much. His work being done, he is full of fears for it. There was too little beauty, he doubted, and too little human interest; and perhaps all the feeling it could be expected to awaken would be wonder at the strangeness of the tale and the monstrosity of the fiction. He can only comfort himself by looking forward, and resolving that Pelayo shall be begun as soon as his plan is sufficiently matured. Four days later Landor thus replied:

"Hardly could I assure myself that I was speaking with sincerity if I congratulated you on the completion of Kehama, on abandoning those scenes and images which must have given such exquisite and enchanting pleasure as they were rising and passing in your mind. You are right in beginning another poem while the heart is warm with poetry. Pelayo and Richard the First are the two finest subjects in the world. I thought of Sertorius once; but, I know not how, it appears to me that nothing romantic or poetical can coexist with what is Roman. These two unfortunate words stand up, backing one another against me and accusing me of a quibble. I meant simply to say that the Romans were a blunt flat people, and that even a Roman name breaks the spell of poetry on plain historical ground. Spain is even yet a sort. of faeryland, and we are yet not too familiar with the faces of Goths and Moors. You possess here peculiar advantages. No other man in Europe has had so minute an insight of their history and character.

"I perceive in many of the verses in Kehama a particular ring of rhyme, a recurrence not marking, nor waiting for, the termination: such as we find in Italian: :

'Ma sento che adesso
L'istesso non è.'

Nor indeed is it always in the same place. In some instances it has not gratified my ear, coming upon it when it was unprepared. If the poem could be translated into any Oriental language, what a happy effect it might produce! It would show them that puny conceits and weak extravagance are no requisites in poetry, and that wildness of imagery is not inconsistent with truth and simplicity of expression. I have read everything Oriental I could lay my hands on, and everything good may be comprised in thirty or forty lines. There is a prodigious deal of puckering and flouncing and spangles, but nothing fresh, nothing graceful, nothing standing straight upwards or moving straight forwards on its feet. I would rather have written the worst page in the Odyssea than all the stuff Sir William Jones makes such a pother and palaver on; yet what volumes would it fill! what libraries would it suffocate! God forbid that I should ever be drowned in any of these butts of malmsey! It is better to describe a girl getting a tumble over a skipping-rope made of a wreath of flowers."

The rest of the letter, dated 30th November, 1809, was filled with a Latin idyl. Like Sir Roger de Coverley, Landor had been reading at the end of a dictionary, not like him an account of Hector, but the story of Callirhoe, who spurned the love of Coresus, priest of Bacchus.

whereupon he swore and prayed to his god, who visited her people with pestilence. In their affliction they betook themselves to Dodona, when Jupiter announced that only the death of Callirhoe or some one in her stead could remove the curse, and Coresus was appointed to fulfil the command of Jove. But when Callirhoe stood before him at the altar, his revenge paled before his love and pity, and he drove the knife into his own bosom. Landor had written this pretty and pathetic story in excellent Latin hexameters,* close and dramatic, and now sent the first sixty-eight to his friend, sending the remaining sixty-two in a second letter after some weeks' interval, during which Southey had been silent.

"I have been happy in the idea that you are employed in something interesting to yourself and the age and other selves and other ages, else I should have complained a little that I have not heard from you so very long a time. I remember that I transcribed some Latin verses in my last, but cannot find where I left off! Whether these are good or bad or indifferent, they are better than anything I can write on the spur of the occasion, for these are spurs that always catch my great-coat in getting on. When I have done writing I shall find a thousand things I ought to have written about."

Southey, alas! had a good reason for not acknowledging the Latin idyl: he had not been able to decipher it, and very frankly doth confess so much. He had also been hoping to send Landor the first sections of Pelayo. His letter is dated March, 1810.

"It is very long since you have heard from me, and for a twofold reason: first, because your verses tantalized me as a barrel of oysters would have done if set before me without a knife. I could not read them. There is little difficulty in understanding the worst possible handwriting in our own every-day language; though I once saw two parcels which had travelled all over England, and at last found their way by the lucky guess of some post-office clerk, who wrote on them 'Try Durham': they had tried Dublin previously. But when a foresight of the meaning is necessary to make out the words, anything not easy in itself becomes very difficult. If I could have read these verses, I should have understood them; because I did not understand, I could not read them. The case, however, is not desperate in some season of leisure I purpose transcribing them, and shall thus make them out step by step.

"The other reason was that I might send you the first section of Pelayo, and this I have been prevented from completing because my hours for poetry have been partly employed in correcting Kehama, partly diverted to the pressing business of the Edinburgh Register. Kehama is half printed, and the remaining half still requires correction. I want to get rid of the snake in the water-chambers, which is neither well conceived nor well written; and something is wanting at the conclusion. It will probably be published in June. I have made my usual bargain with the booksellers, that is to say, no bargain at all: they print, and I share the profits. Scott recommended strongly the quarto form, and quarto accordingly it is; my own opinion being that in whatever form it appeared a sale to clear the expense was certain, and anything beyond that exceedingly improbable."

It is the seventh of the Idylla Heroica in Poemata et Inscriptiones (1847), and a translation by himself is in the Hellenics (1859), pp. 57 - 63.