To account for the variations which may be remarked in this last edition
of my Sonnets, from that which was first published fifty years ago, it
may be proper to state, that to the best of my recollection, they now
appear nearly as they were originally composed in my solitary hours;
when, in youth a wanderer among distant scenes, I sought forgetfulness
of the first disappointment in early affections.
Delicacy even now, though the grave has long closed over the beloved
object, would forbid entering on a detail of the peculiar circumstances
in early life, and the anguish which occasioned these poetical
meditations. In fact, I never thought of writing them down at the time,
and many had escaped my recollection;[2] but three years after my return
to England, on my way to the banks of Cherwell, where
"I bade the pipe farewell, and that sad lay
Whose music, on my melancholy way,
I wooed,"
passing through Bath, I wrote down all I could recollect of these
effusions, most elaborately _mending_ the versification from the natural
flow of music in which they occurred to me, and having thus _corrected_
and written them out, took them myself to the late Mr Cruttwell, with
the name of "Fourteen Sonnets, written chiefly on Picturesque Spots
during a Journey."
I had three times knocked at this amiable printer's door, whose kind
smile I still recollect; and at last, with much hesitation, ventured to
unfold my message; it was to inquire whether he would give any thing for
"Fourteen Sonnets," to be published with or without the name.[3] He at
once declined the purchase, and informed me he doubted very much whether
the publication would repay the expense of printing, which would come to
about five pounds. It was at last determined one hundred copies, in
quarto, should be published as a kind of "forlorn hope;" and these
"Fourteen Sonnets" I left to their fate and thought no more of getting
rich by poetry! In fact, I owed the most I ever owed at Oxford, at this
time, namely, seventy pounds;[4] and knowing my father's large family
and trying circumstances, and those of my poor mother, I shrunk from
asking more money when I left home, and went back with a heavy heart to
Oxford, under the conscious weight, that my poetic scheme failing, I had
no means of paying Parsons, the mercer's, bill! This was the origin of
the publication.
As this plain account is so connected with whatever may be my name in
criticism and poetry, it is hoped it will be pardoned.
All thoughts of succeeding as a poet were now abandoned; but, half a
year afterwards, I received a letter from the printer informing me that
the hundred copies were all sold, adding, that if I had published FIVE
HUNDRED copies, he had no doubt they would have been sold also.
This, in my then situation, my father now dead, and my mother a widow
with seven children, and with a materially reduced income (from the loss
of the rectories of Uphill and Brean in Somerset), was gratifying
indeed; all my golden dreams of poetical success were renewed;--the
number of the sonnets first published was increased, and five hundred
copies, by the congratulating printer, with whose family I have lived in
kindest amity from that hour, were recommended to issue from the press
of the editor of the _Bath Chronicle_.
But this was not all, the five hundred copies were sold to great
advantage, for it was against my will that _five hundred_ copies should
be printed, till the printer told me he would take the risk on himself,
on the usual terms, at that time, of bookseller and author.
Soon afterwards, it was agreed that _seven hundred and fifty_ copies
should be printed, in a smaller and elegant size. I had received
Coleridge's warm testimony; but soon after this third edition came out,
my friend, Mr Cruttwell, the printer, wrote a letter saying that two
young gentlemen, strangers, one a particularly handsome and pleasing
youth, lately from Westminster School, and both literary and
intelligent, spoke in high commendation of my volume, and if I recollect
right, expressed a desire to have some poems printed in the same type
and form. Who these young men were I knew not at the time, but the
communication of the circumstance was to me most gratifying; and how
much more gratifying, when, from one of them, after he himself had
achieved the fame of one of the most virtuous and eloquent of the
writers in his generation, I received a first visit at my parsonage in
Wiltshire upwards of forty years afterwards! It was ROBERT SOUTHEY. We
parted in my garden last year, when stealing time and sorrow had marked
his still manly, but most interesting countenance.[5]--Therefore,