Robert Southey Quotes

“I eat oranges, figs, and delicious pears, drink Colares wine, a sort of half-way excellence between port and claret, dream of poem after poem and play after play, take a siesta of two hours, and am as happy as if life were but one everlasting today, and tomorrow not to be provided for.”
― Rose Macaulay, They Went To Portugal

“Read they will not. Indeed, if they would, they have scarcely a book in their own language fit to be read. I would our novel mongers … were transported here, and ordered to manufacture trash for the Portuguese. Anything that would teach them to read!’ The Academy, he complained bitterly, had not even been able to get beyond A in the huge dictionary it had begun six years ago.”
― Rose Macaulay, They Went To Portugal

“Gradually he learnt to endure the latitude and rains for the sake of the beauty of mountains and lakes. But he still longed to exchange it for Portugal. ‘Society, connections, native language – all these are weighty things; but what are they to the permanent and perpetual exhilaration of a climate that not merely prolongs life, but gives you double the life while it lasts? I have actually felt a positive pleasure in breathing there; and even here, in this magnificent spot, the recollection of the Tagus, and the Serra de Ossa, of Coimbra, and its cypresses and orange groves and olives, its hills and mountains, its venerable buildings, and its dear river, of the Vale of Algarve, the little islands of beauty amid the desert of Alentejo, and, above all, of Sintra, the most blessed spot in the habitable globe, will almost bring tears into my eyes.”
― Rose Macaulay, They Went To Portugal