Southey - No. 134 of 'Harper's Handy Series', 'English Men of Letters'

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Title: Southey - No. 134 of 'Harper's Handy Series', 'English Men of Letters'
Author: Dowden, Edward
Language: English
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_No. 134_ _25 Cts._

HARPER’S HANDY SERIES

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Issued Weekly

JUNE 3, 1887

Subscription Price
per Year, 52 Numbers, $15

Entered at the Post-Office at New York, as Second-class Mail
Matter

English Men of Letters
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY

SOUTHEY

BY
EDWARD DOWDEN

_Books you may hold readily in your hand are the most useful,
after all._
DR. JOHNSON

NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
1887

HARPER’S HANDY SERIES.

_Latest Issues._

NO. CENTS.

101. THE CHAPLAIN’S CRAZE. A Novel. By G. Manville Fenn. 25

102. BETWEEN TWO LOVES. A Tale of the West Riding. By Amelia E.
Barr. 25

103. THAT WINTER NIGHT; OR, LOVE’S VICTORY. A Novel. By Robert
Buchanan. 25

104. THE BRIGHT STAR OF LIFE. A Novel. By B. L. Farjeon. 25

105. THE GUILTY RIVER. A Novel. By Wilkie Collins. 25

106. GOLDEN BELLS. A Peal in Seven Changes. By R. E. Francillon. 25

107. THE NINE OF HEARTS. A Novel. By B. L. Farjeon. 25

108. A MODERN TELEMACHUS. A Novel. By Charlotte M. Yonge. 25

109. CASHEL BYRON’S PROFESSION. A Novel. By George Bernard Shaw. 25

110. BRITTA. A Shetland Romance. By George Temple. Illustrated. 25

111. A CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION. A Novel. By the Author of “The
Atelier du Lys.” Illustrated. 25

112. A STRANGE INHERITANCE. A Novel. By F. M. F. Skene. 25

113. LOCKSLEY HALL SIXTY YEARS AFTER, Etc. By Alfred, Lord
Tennyson. 25

114. REGIMENTAL LEGENDS. By John Strange Winter. 25

115. YEAST. A Problem. By Charles Kingsley. 25

116. CRANFORD. By Mrs. Gaskell. 25

117. LUCY CROFTON. A Novel. By Mrs. Oliphant. 25

118. MIGNON’S SECRET, and WANTED—A WIFE. By John Strange Winter. 25

119. SAMUEL JOHNSON. By Leslie Stephen. 25

120. EDWARD GIBBON. By James Cotter Morison. 25

121. SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Richard H. Hutton. 25

122. SHELLEY. By John A. Symonds. 25

123. HUME. By Professor Huxley. 25

124. GOLDSMITH. By William Black. 15

125. DANIEL DEFOE. By William Minto. 20

126. SHE. A History of Adventure. By H. Rider Haggard. Profusely
Illustrated. 25

127. MACHINE POLITICS AND MONEY IN ELECTIONS IN NEW YORK CITY.
By William M. Ivins. 25

128. ROBERT BURNS. By Principal J. C. Shairp. 25

129. SPENSER. By R. W. Church. 25

130. THACKERAY. By Anthony Trollope. 25

131. BURKE. By John Morley. 25

132. MILTON. By Mark Pattison. 25

133. HAWTHORNE. By Henry James, Jr. 20

134. SOUTHEY. By Edward Dowden. 25

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English Men of Letters

EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY

SOUTHEY

BY
EDWARD DOWDEN.

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NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
FRANKLIN SQUARE

ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS.

EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.

JOHNSON Leslie Stephen.
GIBBON J. C. Morison.
SCOTT R. H. Hutton.
SHELLEY J. A. Symonds.
HUME T. H. Huxley.
GOLDSMITH William Black.
DEFOE William Minto.
BURNS J. C. Shairp.
SPENSER R. W. Church.
THACKERAY Anthony Trollope.
BURKE John Morley.
MILTON Mark Pattison.
HAWTHORNE Henry James, Jr.
SOUTHEY E. Dowden.
CHAUCER A. W. Ward.
BUNYAN J. A. Froude.
COWPER Goldwin Smith.
POPE Leslie Stephen.
BYRON John Nichol.
LOCKE Thomas Fowler.
WORDSWORTH F. Myers.
DRYDEN G. Saintsbury.
LANDOR Sidney Colvin.
DE QUINCEY David Masson.
LAMB Alfred Ainger.
BENTLEY R. C. Jebb.
DICKENS A. W. Ward.
GRAY E. W. Gosse.
SWIFT Leslie Stephen.
STERNE H. D. Traill.
MACAULAY J. Cotter Morison.
FIELDING Austin Dobson.
SHERIDAN Mrs. Oliphant.
ADDISON W. J. Courthope.
BACON R. W. Church.
COLERIDGE H. D. Traill.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY J. A. Symonds.

12mo, Cloth, 75 cents per volume.

PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.

☞ _Any of the above works will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any
part of the United States, on receipt of the price._

NOTE.

I am indebted throughout to _The Life and Correspondence of Robert
Southey_, edited by the Rev. C. C. Southey, six volumes, 1850, and to
_Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey_, edited by J. W. Warter,
B.D., four volumes, 1856. Many other sources have been consulted. I thank
Mr. W. J. Craig for help given in examining Southey manuscripts, and Mr.
T. W. Lyster for many valuable suggestions.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

CHAPTER I.

CHILDHOOD 1

CHAPTER II.

WESTMINSTER, OXFORD, PANTISOCRACY, AND MARRIAGE 19

CHAPTER III.

WANDERINGS, 1795-1803 44

CHAPTER IV.

WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803-1839 80

CHAPTER V.

WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803-1839 (_continued_) 112

CHAPTER VI.

CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803-1843 142

CHAPTER VII.

SOUTHEY’S WORK IN LITERATURE 187

SOUTHEY.

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD.

No one of his generation lived so completely in and for literature as did
Southey. “He is,” said Byron, “the only existing entire man of letters.”
With him literature served the needs both of the material life and of
the life of the intellect and imagination; it was his means of earning
daily bread, and also the means of satisfying his highest ambitions and
desires. This, which was true of Southey at five-and-twenty years of age,
was equally true at forty, fifty, sixty. During all that time he was
actively at work accumulating, arranging, and distributing knowledge; no
one among his contemporaries gathered so large a store from the records
of the past; no one toiled with such steadfast devotion to enrich his
age; no one occupied so honourable a place in so many provinces of
literature. There is not, perhaps, any single work of Southey’s the loss
of which would be felt by us as a capital misfortune. But the more we
consider his total work, its mass, its variety, its high excellence, the
more we come to regard it as a memorable, an extraordinary achievement.

Southey himself, however, stands above his works. In subject they are
disconnected, and some of them appear like huge fragments. It is the
presence of one mind, one character in all, easily recognizable by him
who knows Southey, which gives them a vital unity. We could lose the
_History of Brazil_, or the _Peninsular War_, or the _Life of Wesley_,
and feel that if our possessions were diminished, we ourselves in our
inmost being had undergone no loss which might not easily be endured. But
he who has once come to know Southey’s voice as the voice of a friend,
so clear, so brave, so honest, so full of boyish glee, so full of manly
tenderness, feels that if he heard that voice no more a portion of his
life were gone. To make acquaintance with the man is better than to study
the subjects of his books. In such a memoir as the present, to glance
over the contents of a hundred volumes, dealing with matters widely
remote, would be to wander upon a vast circumference when we ought to
strike for the centre. If the reader come to know Southey as he read and
wrote in his library, as he rejoiced and sorrowed among his children, as
he held hands with good old friends, as he walked by the lake-side, or
lingered to muse near some mountain stream, as he hoped and feared for
England, as he thought of life and death and a future beyond the grave,
the end of this small book will have been attained.

At the age of forty-six Robert Southey wrote the first of a series
of autobiographic sketches; his spirit was courageous, and life had
been good to him; but it needed more than his courage to live again
in remembrance with so many of the dead; having told the story of his
boyhood, he had not the heart to go farther. The autobiography rambles
pleasantly into by-ways of old Bath and Bristol life; at Westminster
School it leaves him. So far we shall go along with it; for what lies
beyond, a record of Southey’s career must be brought together from a
multitude of letters, published or still remaining in manuscript, and
from many and massy volumes in prose and verse, which show how the
industrious hours sped by.

Southey’s father was a linen-draper of Bristol. He had left his native
fields under the Quantock hills to take service in a London shop, but
his heart suffered in its exile. The tears were in his eyes one day when
a porter went by carrying a hare, and the remembrance suddenly came to
him of his rural sports. On his master’s death he took a place behind
the counter of Britton’s shop in Wine Street, Bristol; and when, twelve
years later, he opened a shop for himself in the same business, he had,
with tender reminiscence, a hare painted for a device upon his windows.
He kept his grandfather’s sword which had been borne in Monmouth’s
rebellion; he loved the chimes and quarter-boys of Christ Church,
Bristol, and tried, as church-warden, to preserve them. What else of
poetry there may have been in the life of Robert Southey the elder is
lost among the buried epics of prosaic lives. We cannot suppose that as a
man of business he was sharp and shrewd; he certainly was not successful.
When the draper’s work was done, he whiled away the hours over Felix
Farley’s Bristol Journal, his only reading. For library some score
of books shared with his wine-glasses the small cupboard in the back
parlour; its chief treasures were the _Spectator_, the _Guardian_, some
eighteenth-century poems, dead even then, and one or two immortal plays.

On Sundays Mr. Southey, then a bachelor, would stroll to Bedminster to
dine at the pleasant house of Mrs. Hill—a substantial house to which
Edward Hill, gentleman, brought his second wife, herself a widow; a house
rich in old English comfort, with its diamond-tiled garden-way and
jessamine-covered porch, its wainscoted “best kitchen,” its blue room and
green room and yellow room, its grapes and greengages and nectarines, its
sweet-williams and stocks and syringas. Among these pleasant surroundings
the young draper found it natural, on Sabbath afternoons, to make love to
pleasant Margaret Hill. “Never,” writes her son Robert Southey—“never was
any human being blessed with a sweeter temper or a happier disposition.”
Her face had been marred by the seams of small-pox, but its brightness
and kindness remained; there was a charm in her clear hazel eyes, so good
a temper and so alert an understanding were to be read in them. She had
not gone to any school except one for dancing, and “her state,” declares
Southey, “was the more gracious;” her father had, however, given her
lessons in the art of whistling; she could turn a tune like a blackbird.
From a mother, able to see a fact swiftly and surely, and who knew both
to whistle and to dance, Southey inherited that alertness of intellect
and that joyous temper, without which he could not have accomplished his
huge task-work, never yielding to a mood of rebellion or _ennui_.

After the courtship on Sunday afternoons came the wedding, and before
long a beautiful boy was born, who died in infancy. On the 12th of
August, 1774, Mrs. Southey was again in the pain of childbirth. “Is it a
boy?” she asked the nurse. “Ay, a great ugly boy!” With such salutation
from his earliest critic the future poet-laureate entered this world.
“God forgive me,” his mother exclaimed afterwards, in relating the
event, “when I saw what a great red creature it was, covered with rolls
of fat, I thought I should never be able to love him.” In due time the
red creature proved to be a distinctively human child, whose curly
hair and sensitive feelings made him a mother’s darling. He had not yet
heard of sentiment or of Rousseau, but he wept at the pathos of romantic
literature, at the tragic fate of the “Children sliding on the ice all
on a summer’s day,” or the too early death of “Billy Pringle’s pig,” and
he would beg the reciters not to proceed. His mother’s household cares
multiplied, and Southey, an unbreeched boy of three years, was borne away
one morning by his faithful foster-mother Patty to be handed over to
the tender mercies of a schoolmistress. Ma’am Powell was old and grim,
and with her lashless eyes gorgonized the new pupil; on the seizure of
her hand he woke to rebellion, kicking lustily, and crying, “Take me to
Pat! I don’t like ye! you’ve got ugly eyes! take me to Pat, I say!” But
soft-hearted Pat had gone home, sobbing.

Mrs. Southey’s one weakness was that of submitting too meekly to the
tyranny of an imperious half-sister, Miss Tyler, the daughter of
Grandmother Hill by her first marriage. For this weakness there were
excuses; Miss Tyler was an elder sister by many years; she had property
of her own; she passed for a person of fashion, and was still held to be
a beauty; above all, she had the advantage of a temper so capricious and
violent that to quarrel with her at all might be to lose her sisterly
regard for ever. Her struggling sister’s eldest son took Aunt Tyler’s
fancy; it was a part of her imperious kindness to adopt or half-adopt
the boy. Aunt Tyler lived in Bath; in no other city could a gentlewoman
better preserve health and good looks, or enjoy so much society of
distinction on easy but not too ample means; it possessed a charming
theatre, and Miss Tyler was a patron of the drama. To Bath, then, she
had brought her portrait by Gainsborough, her inlaid cabinet of ebony,
her cherry-wood arm-chair, her mezzotints after Angelica Kaufmann, her
old-maid hoards of this and of that, the woman servant she had saved
from the toils of matrimony, and the old man, harmless as one of the
crickets which he nightly fed until he died. To Bath Miss Tyler also
brought her nephew; and she purchased a copy of the new gospel of
education, Rousseau’s _Emilius_, in order to ascertain how Nature should
have her perfect work with a boy in petticoats. Here the little victim,
without companions, without play, without the child’s beatitudes of
dirt and din, was carefully swathed in the odds and ends of habits and
humours which belonged to a maiden lady of a whimsical, irrational,
and self-indulgent temper. Miss Tyler, when not prepared for company,
wandered about the house—a faded beauty—in the most faded and fluttering
of costumes; but in her rags she was spotless. To preserve herself and
her worldly gear from the dust, for ever floating and gathering in this
our sordid atmosphere, was the business of her life. Her acquaintances
she divided into the clean and the unclean—the latter class being much
the more numerous. Did one of the unclean take a seat in her best room,
the infected chair must be removed to the garden to be aired. But did
he seat himself in Miss Tyler’s own arm-chair, pressing his abominable
person into Miss Tyler’s own cushion, then passionate were her dismay
and despair. To her favourites she was gracious and high-bred, regaling
them with reminiscences of Lady Bateman, and with her views on taste,
Shakspeare, and the musical glasses. For her little nephew she invented
the pretty recreation of pricking play-bills; all capital letters
were to be illuminated with pin-holes; it was not a boisterous nor an
ungenteel sport. At other times the boy would beguile the hours in the
garden, making friends with flowers and insects, or looking wistfully
towards that sham castle on Claverton Hill, seat of romantic mystery,
but, alas! two miles away, and therefore beyond the climbing powers of
a refined gentlewoman. Southey’s hardest daily trial was the luxurious
morning captivity of his aunt’s bed; still at nine, at ten that lady lay
in slumber; the small urchin, long perked up and broad awake, feared by
sound or stir to rouse her, and would nearly wear his little wits away in
plotting re-arrangements of the curtain-pattern, or studying the motes at
mazy play in the slant sunbeam. His happiest season was when all other
little boys were fast asleep; then, splendid in his gayest “jam,” he
sat beside Miss Tyler in a front row of the best part of the theatre;
when the yawning fits had passed, he was as open-eyed as the oldest, and
stared on, filling his soul with the spectacle, till the curtain fell.

The “great red creature,” Robert Southey, had now grown into the lean
greyhound of his after-life; his long legs wanted to be stirring, and
there were childish ambitions already at work in his head. Freedom became
dearer to him than the daintiest cage, and when at six he returned to
his father’s house in Wine Street, it was with rejoicing. Now, too, his
aunt issued an edict that the long-legged lad should be breeched; an
epoch of life was complete. Wine Street, with its freedom, seemed good;
but best of all was a visit to Grandmother Hill’s pleasant house at
Bedminster. “Here I had all wholesome liberty, all wholesome indulgence,
all wholesome enjoyments; and the delight which I there learnt to take
in rural sights and sounds has grown up with me, and continues unabated
to this day.” And now that scrambling process called education was to
begin. A year was spent by Southey as a day-scholar with old Mr. Foot, a
dissenting minister, whose unorthodoxy as to the doctrine of the Trinity
was in some measure compensated by sound traditional views as to the uses
of the cane. Mr. Foot, having given proof on the back of his last and his
least pupil of steadfastness in the faith according to Busby, died; and
it was decided that the boy should be placed under Thomas Flower, who
kept school at Corston, nine miles from Bristol. To a tender mother’s
heart nine miles seemed a breadth of severance cruel as an Atlantic. Mrs.
Southey, born to be happy herself, and to make others happy, had always
heretofore met her son with a smile; now he found her weeping in her
chamber; with an effort, such as Southey, man and boy, always knew how to
make on like occasions, he gulped down his own rising sob, and tried to
brighten her sorrow with a smile.

A boy’s first night at school is usually not a time of mirth. The heart
of the solitary little lad at Corston sank within him. A melancholy hung
about the decayed mansion which had once known better days; the broken
gateways, the summer-houses falling in ruins, the grass-grown court,
the bleakness of the schoolroom, ill-disguised by its faded tapestry,
depressed the spirits. Southey’s pillow was wet with tears before he
fell asleep. The master was at one with his surroundings; he, too, was
a piece of worthy old humanity now decayed; he, too, was falling in
untimely ruins. From the memory of happier days, from the troubles of
his broken fortune, from the vexations of the drunken maid-servant who
was now his wife, he took refuge in contemplating the order and motions
of the stars. “When he came into his desk, even there he was thinking of
the stars, and looked as if he were out of humour, not from ill-nature,
but because his calculations were interrupted.” Naturally the work of
the school, such as it was, fell, for the most part, into the hands
of Charley, Thomas Flower’s son. Both father and son knew the mystery
of that flamboyant penmanship admired by our ancestors, but Southey’s
handwriting had not yet advanced from the early rounded to the decorated
style. His spelling he could look back upon with pride: on one occasion
a grand spelling tournament between the boys took place; and little
Southey can hardly have failed to overthrow his taller adversaries with
the posers, “crystallization” and “coterie.” The household arrangements
at Corston, as may be supposed, were not of the most perfect kind; Mrs.
Flower had so deep an interest in her bottle, and poor Thomas Flower in
his planets. The boys each morning washed themselves, or did not, in
the brook ankle-deep which ran through the yard. In autumn the brook
grew deeper and more swift, and after a gale it would bring within
bounds a tribute of floating apples from the neighbouring orchard. That
was a merry day, also in autumn, when the boys were employed to pelt
the master’s walnut-trees; Southey, too small to bear his part in the
battery, would glean among the fallen leaves and twigs, inhaling the
penetrating fragrance which ever after called up a vision of the brook,
the hillside, and its trees. One schoolboy sport—that of “conquering”
with snail-shells—seems to have been the special invention of Corston.
The snail-shells, not tenantless, were pressed point against point
until one was broken in. A great conqueror was prodigiously prized, was
treated with honourable distinction, and was not exposed to danger save
in great emergencies. One who had slain his hundreds might rank with
Rodney, to see whom the boys had marched down to the Globe inn, and for
whom they had cheered and waved their Sunday cocked hats as he passed
by. So, on the whole, life at Corston had its pleasures. Chief among
its pains was the misery of Sunday evenings in winter; then the pupils
were assembled in the hall to hear the master read a sermon, or a portion
of Stackhouse’s _History of the Bible_. “Here,” writes Southey, “I sat
at the end of a long form, in sight but not within feeling of the fire,
my feet cold, my eyelids heavy as lead, and yet not daring to close
them—kept awake by fear alone, in total inaction, and under the operation
of a lecture more soporific than the strongest sleeping dose.” While the
boys’ souls were thus provided for, there was a certain negligence in
matters unspiritual; an alarm got abroad that infection was among them.
This hastened the downfall of the school. One night disputing was heard
between Charley and his father; in the morning poor Flower was not to be
seen, and Charley appeared with a black eye. So came to an end the year
at Corston. Southey, aged eight, was brought home, and underwent “a three
days’ purgatory in brimstone.”[1]

What Southey had gained of book-lore by his two years’ schooling was
as little as could be; but he was already a lover of literature after
a fashion of his own. A friend of Miss Tyler had presented him, as
soon as he could read, with a series of Newbery’s sixpenny books for
children—_Goody Twoshoes_, _Giles Gingerbread_, and the rest—delectable
histories, resplendent in Dutch-gilt paper. The true masters of his
imagination, however, were the players and playwrights who provided
amusement for the pleasure-loving people of Bath. Miss Tyler was
acquainted with Colman, and Sheridan, and Cumberland, and Holcroft; her
talk was of actors and authors, and her nephew soon perceived that,
honoured as were both classes, the authors were awarded the higher place.
His first dreams of literary fame, accordingly, were connected with the
drama. “‘It is the easiest thing in the world to write a play,’ said I
to Miss Palmer (a friend of Aunt Tyler’s), as we were in a carriage on
Redcliffe Hill one day, returning from Bristol to Bedminster. ‘Is it, my
dear?’ was her reply. ‘Yes,’ I continued, ‘for you know you have only to
think what you would say if you were in the place of the characters, and
to make them say it.’” With such a canon of dramatic authorship Southey
began a play on the continence of Scipio, and actually completed an act
and a half. Shakespeare he read and read again; Beaumont and Fletcher
he had gone through before he was eight years old. Were they not great
theatrical names, Miss Tyler reasoned, and therefore improving writers
for her nephew? and Southey had read them unharmed. When he visited his
aunt from Corston, she was a guest with Miss Palmer at Bath; a covered
passage led to the playhouse, and every evening the delighted child,
seated between the two lady-patronesses of the stage, saw the pageantry
and heard the poetry. A little later he persuaded a schoolfellow to write
a tragedy; Ballard liked the suggestion, but could not invent a plot.
Southey gave him a story; Ballard approved, but found a difficulty in
devising names for the _dramatis personæ_. Southey supplied a list of
heroic names: they were just what Ballard wanted—but he was at a loss to
know what the characters should say. “I made the same attempt,” continued
Southey, “with another schoolfellow, and with no better success. It
seemed to me very odd that they should not be able to write plays as well
as to do their lessons.”

The ingenious Ballard was an ornament of the school of William Williams,
whither Southey was sent as a day-boarder after the catastrophe of
Corston. Under the care of this kindly, irascible, little, bewigged old
Welshman, Southey remained during four years. Williams was not a model
schoolmaster, but he was a man of character and of a certain humorous
originality. In two things he believed with all the energy of his
nature—in his own spelling-book printed for his own school, and in the
Church Catechism. Latin was left to the curate; when Southey reached
Virgil, old Williams, delighted with classical attainments rare among
his pupils, thought of taking the boy into his own hands, but his little
Latin had faded from his brain; and the curate himself seemed to have
reached his term in the _Tityre tu patulæ recubans sub tegmine fagi_,
so that to Southey, driven round and round the pastoral paddock, the
names of Tityrus and Melibœus became for ever after symbols of _ennui_.
No prosody was taught: “I am,” said Southey, “at this day as liable to
make a false quantity as any Scotchman.” The credit, however, is due
to Williams of having discovered in his favourite pupil a writer of
English prose. One day each boy of a certain standing was called upon
to write a letter on any subject he pleased: never had Southey written
a letter except the formal one dictated at Corston which began with
“Honoured Parents.” He cried for perplexity and vexation; but Williams
encouraged him, and presently a description of Stonehenge filled his
slate. The old man was surprised and delighted. A less amiable feeling
possessed Southey’s schoolfellows: a plan was forthwith laid for his
humiliation—could he tell them, fine scholar that he was, what the
letters _i. e._ stand for? Southey, never lacking in courage, drew a bow
at a venture: for John the Evangelist.

The old Welshman, an original himself, had an odd following of friends
and poor retainers. There was the crazy rhymester known as “Dr. Jones;”
tradition darkly related that a dose of cantharides administered by
waggish boys of a former generation had robbed him of his wits. “The most
celebrated _improvisatore_ was never half so vain of his talent as this
queer creature, whose little figure of some five-feet-two I can perfectly
call to mind, with his suit of rusty black, his more rusty wig, and his
old cocked hat. Whenever he entered the schoolroom he was greeted with a
shout of welcome.” There was also Pullen, the breeches-maker—a glorious
fellow, brimful of vulgarity, prosperity, and boisterous good-nature;
above all, an excellent hand at demanding a half-holiday. A more graceful
presence, but a more fleeting, was that of Mrs. Estan, the actress, who
came to learn from the dancing-master her _minuet de la cour_ in _The
Belle’s Stratagem_. Southey himself had to submit to lessons in dancing.
Tom Madge, his constant partner, had limbs that went every way; Southey’s
limbs would go no way: the spectacle presented by their joint endeavours
was one designed for the pencil of Cruikshank. In the art of reading
aloud Miss Tyler had herself instructed her nephew, probably after the
manner of the most approved tragedy queens. The grand style did not
please honest Williams. “Who taught you to read?” he asked, scornfully.
“My aunt,” answered Southey. “Then give my compliments to your aunt, and
tell her that my old horse, that has been dead these twenty years, could
have taught you as well”—a message which her nephew, with the appalling
frankness of youth, delivered, and which was never forgotten.

While Southey was at Corston, his grandmother died; the old lady with the
large, clear, brown, bright eyes, seated in her garden, was no more to be
seen, and the Bedminster house, after a brief occupation by Miss Tyler,
was sold. Miss Tyler spoke of Bristol society with a disdainful sniff;
it was her choice to wander for a while from one genteel watering-place
to another. When Williams gave Southey his first summer holidays, he
visited his aunt at Weymouth. The hours spent there upon the beach were
the most spiritual hours of Southey’s boyhood; he was for the first
time in face of the sea—the sea vast, voiceful, and mysterious. Another
epoch-making event occurred about the same time; good Mrs. Dolignon, his
aunt’s friend, gave him a book—the first which became his very own since
that present of the toy-books of Newbery. It was Hoole’s translation of
Tasso’s _Gerusalemme Liberata_; in it a world of poetical adventure was
opened to the boy. The notes to Tasso made frequent reference to Ariosto;
Bull’s Circulating Library at Bath—a Bodleian to Southey—supplied him
with the version, also by Hoole, of the _Orlando Furioso_; here was a
forest of old romance in which to lose himself. But a greater discovery
was to come; searching the notes again, Southey found mention made of
Spenser, and certain stanzas of Spenser’s chief poem were quoted. “Was
the _Faerie Queene_ on Bull’s shelves?” “Yes,” was the answer; “they
had it, but it was in obsolete language, and the young gentleman would
not understand it.” The young gentleman, who had already gone through
Beaumont and Fletcher, was not daunted; he fell to with the keenest
relish, feeling in Spenser the presence of something which was lacking in
the monotonous couplets of Hoole, and charming himself unaware with the
music of the stanza. Spenser, “not more sweet than pure, and not more
pure than wise,”

“High-priest of all the Muses’ mysteries,”[2]

was henceforth accepted by Southey as his master.

When Miss Tyler had exhausted her friends’ hospitality, and had grown
tired of lodgings, she settled in a pleasant suburban nook at Bristol;
but having a standing quarrel with Thomas Southey, her sister’s
brother-in-law, she would never set foot in the house in Wine Street,
and she tried to estrange her nephew, as far as possible, from his
natural home. Her own brother William, a half-witted creature, she
brought to live with her. “The Squire,” as he was called, was hardly
a responsible being, yet he had a sort of _half-saved_ shrewdness,
and a memory stored with old saws, which, says Southey, “would have
qualified him, had he been born two centuries earlier, to have worn
motley, and figured with a cap and bells and a bauble in some baron’s
hall.” A saying of his, “Curses are like young chickens, they always
come home to roost,” was remembered by Southey in after-years; and when
it was turned into Greek by Coleridge, to serve as motto to _The Curse
of Kehama_, a mysterious reference was given—Αποφθ. Ανεκ. του Γυλίελ.
του Μητ. With much beer-swilling and tobacco-chewing, premature old age
came upon him. He would sit for hours by the kitchen fire, or, on warm
days, in the summer-house, his eyes intently following the movements of
the neighbours. He loved to play at marbles with his nephew, and at loo
with Miss Tyler; most of all, he loved to be taken to the theatre. The
poor Squire had an affectionate heart; he would fondle children with
tenderness, and at his mother’s funeral his grief was overwhelming.
A companion of his own age Southey found in Shadrach Weekes, the boy
of all work, a brother of Miss Tyler’s maid. Shad and his young master
would scour the country in search of violet and cowslip roots, and the
bee and fly orchis, until wood and rock by the side of the Avon had
grown familiar and had grown dear; and now, instead of solitary pricking
of play-bills, Southey set to work, with the help of Shad, to make and
fit up such a theatre for puppets as would have been the pride even of
Wilhelm Meister.

But fate had already pronounced that Southey was to be poet, and not
player. Tasso and Ariosto and Spenser claimed him, or so he dreamed. By
this time he had added to his epic cycle Pope’s _Homer_ and Mickle’s
_Lusiad_. That prose romance, embroidered with sixteenth-century
affectations, but with a true chivalric sentiment at its heart, Sidney’s
_Arcadia_, was also known to him. He had read Arabian and mock-Arabian
tales; he had spent the pocket-money of many weeks on a Josephus, and he
had picked up from Goldsmith something of Greek and Roman history. So
breathed upon by poetry, and so furnished with erudition, Southey, at
twelve years old, found it the most natural thing in the world to become
an epic poet. His removal from the old Welshman’s school having been
hastened by that terrible message which Miss Tyler could not forgive,
Southey, before proceeding to Westminster, was placed for a year under a
clergyman, believed to be competent to carry his pupils beyond Tityrus
and Melibœus. But, except some skill in writing English themes, little
was gained from this new tutor. The year, however, was not lost. “I do
not remember,” Southey writes, “in any part of my life to have been so
conscious of intellectual improvement ... an improvement derived not
from books or instruction, but from constantly exercising myself in
English verse.” “Arcadia” was the title of his first dream-poem; it was
to be grafted upon the _Orlando Furioso_, with a new hero, and in a new
scene; this dated from his ninth or tenth year, and some verses were
actually composed. The epic of the Trojan Brutus and that of King Richard
III. were soon laid aside, but several folio sheets of an _Egbert_ came
to be written. The boy’s pride and ambition were solitary and shy. One
day he found a lady, a visitor of Miss Tyler’s, with the sacred sheets of
_Egbert_ in her hand; her compliments on his poem were deeply resented;
and he determined henceforth to write his epics in a private cipher.
Heroic epistles, translations from Latin poetry, satires, descriptive and
moral pieces, a poem in dialogue exhibiting the story of the Trojan war,
followed in rapid succession; last, a “Cassibelan,” of which three books
were completed. Southey, looking back on these attempts, notices their
deficiency in plan, in construction. “It was long before I acquired this
power—not fairly, indeed, till I was about five or six and thirty; and
it was gained by practice, in the course of which I learnt to perceive
wherein I was deficient.”

One day in February, 1788, a carriage rumbled out of Bath, containing
Miss Palmer, Miss Tyler, and Robert Southey, now a tall, lank boy
with high-poised head, brown curling hair, bright hazel eyes, and an
expression of ardour and energy about the lips and chin. The ladies were
on their way to London for some weeks’ diversion, and Robert Southey
was on his way to school at Westminster. For a while he remained an
inconvenient appendage of his aunt’s, wearying of the great city, longing
for Shad and the carpentry, and the Gloucester meadows and the Avon
cliffs, and the honest eyes and joyous bark of poor Phillis. April the
first—ominous morning—arrived; Southey was driven to Dean’s Yard; his
name was duly entered; his boarding-house determined; his tutor chosen;
farewells were said, and he found himself in a strange world, alone.

CHAPTER II.

WESTMINSTER, OXFORD, PANTISOCRACY, AND MARRIAGE.

Of Southey during his four years at Westminster we know little; his
fragment of autobiography, having brought him to the school, soon comes
to an untimely close; and for this period we possess no letters. But we
know that these were years which contributed much to form his intellect
and character; we know that they were years of ardour and of toil; and
it is certain that now, as heretofore, his advance was less dependent on
what pastors and masters did for him than on what he did for himself.
The highest scholarship—that which unites precision with breadth, and
linguistic science with literary feeling—Southey never attained in
any foreign tongue, except perhaps in the Portuguese and the Spanish.
Whenever the choice lay between pausing to trace out a law of language,
or pushing forward to secure a good armful of miscellaneous facts,
Southey preferred the latter. With so many huge structures of his own
in contemplation, he could not gather too much material, nor gather it
too quickly. Such fortitude as goes to make great scholars he possessed;
his store of patience was inexhaustible; but he could be patient only in
pursuit of his proper objects. He could never learn a language in regular
fashion; the best grammar, he said, was always the shortest. Southey’s
acquaintance with Greek never goes beyond that stage at which Greek,
like fairy gold, is apt to slip away of a sudden unless kept steadfastly
in view, nearly all the Greek he had learnt at Westminster he forgot
at Oxford. A monkish legend in Latin of the Church or a mediæval Latin
chronicle he could follow with the run of the eye; but had he at any
season of his manhood been called on to write a page of Latin prose, it
would probably have resembled the French in which he sometimes sportively
addressed his friends by letter, and in which he uttered himself
valiantly while travelling abroad.

Southey brought to Westminster an imagination stored with the marvels
and the beauty of old romance. He left it skilled in the new sentiment
of the time—a sentiment which found in Werther and Eloisa its dialect,
high-pitched self-conscious, rhapsodical, and not wholly real. His bias
for history was already marked before he entered the school; but his
knowledge consisted of a few clusters of historical facts grouped around
the subjects of various projected epics, and dotting at wide distances
and almost at random the vast expanse of time. Now he made acquaintance
with that book which, more than any other, displays the breadth, the
variety, and the independence of the visible lives of nations. Gibbon’s
_Decline and Fall_ leaves a reader cold who cares only to quicken his own
inmost being by contact with what is most precious in man’s spiritual
history; one chapter of Augustine’s _Confessions_, one sentence of the
_Imitation_—each a live coal from off the altar—will be of more worth to
such an one than all the mass and laboured majesty of Gibbon. But one who
can gaze with a certain impersonal regard on the spectacle of the world
will find the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, more than almost
any other single book, replenish and dilate the mind. In it Southey
viewed for the first time the sweep, the splendour, the coils, the mighty
movement, of the stream of human affairs.

Southey’s ambition on entering Westminster was to have the friendship of
the youths who had acted in the last Westminster play, and whose names
he had seen in the newspaper. Vain hope! for they, already preparing to
tie their hair in tails, were looking onward to the great world, and
had no glance to cast on the unnoted figures of the under-fourth. The
new-comer, according to a custom of the school, was for a time effaced,
ceasing to exist as an individual entity, and being known only as
“shadow” of the senior boy chosen to be “substance” to him during his
noviciate. Southey accepted his effacement the more willingly because
George Strachey, his substance, had a good face and a kindly heart;
unluckily—Strachey boarding at home—they were parted each night. A mild
young aristocrat, joining little with the others, was head of the house;
and Southey, unprotected by his chief, stood exposed to the tyranny of a
fellow-boarder bigger and brawnier than himself, who would souse the ears
of his sleeping victim with water, or on occasions let fly the porter-pot
or the poker at his head. Aspiring beyond these sallies to a larger and
freer style of humour, he attempted one day to hang Southey out of an
upper window by the leg; the pleasantry was taken ill by the smaller boy,
who offered an effectual resistance, and soon obtained his remove to
another chamber. Southey’s mature judgment of boarding-school life was
not, on the whole, favourable; yet to Westminster he owed two of his best
and dearest possessions—the friendship of C. W. W. Wynn, whose generous
loyalty alone made it possible for Southey to pursue literature as his
profession, and the friendship, no less precious, of Grosvenor Bedford,
lasting green and fresh from boyhood until both were white-haired,
venerable men.

Southey’s interest in boyish sports was too slight to beguile him from
the solitude needful for the growth of a poet’s mind. He had thoughts
of continuing Ovid’s Metamorphoses; he planned six books to complete
the Faery Queen, and actually wrote some cantos; already the subject
of _Madoc_ was chosen. And now a gigantic conception, which at a later
time was to bear fruit in such poems as _Thalaba_ and _Kehama_, formed
itself in his mind “When I was a schoolboy at Westminster,” he writes “I
frequented the house of a schoolfellow who has continued till this day
to be one of my most intimate and dearest friends. The house was so near
Dean’s Yard that it was hardly considered as being out of our prescribed
bounds; and I had free access to the library, a well-stored and pleasant
room ... looking over the river. There many of my truant hours were
delightfully spent in reading Picart’s _Religious Ceremonies_. The book
impressed my imagination strongly; and before I left school I had formed
the intention of exhibiting all the more prominent and poetical forms of
mythology, which have at any time obtained among mankind, by making each
the groundwork of an heroic poem.” Southey’s huge design was begotten
upon his _pia mater_ by a folio in a library. A few years earlier
Wordsworth, a boy of fourteen, walking between Hawkshead and Ambleside,
noticed the boughs and leaves of an oak-tree intensely outlined in black
against a bright western sky. “That moment,” he says, “was important in
my poetical history, for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite
variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of
any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them; and I made
a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency.” Two remarkable
incidents in the history of English poetry, and each with something in it
of a typical character.

At Westminster Southey obtained his first literary profits—the guerdon
of the silver penny to which Cowper alludes in his _Table-Talk_.
Southey’s penny—exchanged for current coin in the proportion of six
to one by the mistress of the boarding-house—was always awarded for
English composition. But his fame among his schoolfellows was not of an
early or sudden growth. In the year of Southey’s entrance, some of the
senior boys commenced a weekly paper called _The Trifler_. It imitates,
with some skill, the periodical essay of the post-Johnsonian period:
there is the wide-ranging discussion on the Influence of Liberty on
Genius; there is the sprightly sketch of Amelia, a learned Lady; there
is the moral diatribe on Deists, a Sect of Infidels most dangerous to
Mankind; there are the letters from Numa and from Infelix; there is the
Eastern apologue, beginning, “In the city of Bassora lived Zaydor, the
son of Al-Zored.” Southey lost no time in sending to the editor his
latest verses; a baby sister, Margaretta, had just died, and Southey
expressed in elegy a grief which was real and keen. “The Elegy signed
B. is received”—so Mr. Timothy Touchstone announced on the Saturday
after the manuscript had been dropped into the penny post. The following
Saturday—anxiously expected—brought no poem, but another announcement:
“The Elegy by B. must undergo some Alterations; a Liberty I must request
all my Correspondents to permit me to take.” “After this,” says Southey,
“I looked for its appearance anxiously, but in vain.” Happily no one
sought to discover B., or supposed that he was one with the curly-headed
boy of the under-fourth.

If authorship has its hours of disappointment, it has compensating
moments of glory and of joy. _The Trifler_, having lived to the age of
ten months, deceased. In 1792 Southey, now a great boy, with Strachey,
his sometime “substance,” and his friends Wynn and Bedford, planned a
new periodical of ill-omened name, _The Flagellant_. “I well remember
my feelings,” he writes, “when the first number appeared.... It was
Bedford’s writing, but that circumstance did not prevent me from feeling
that I was that day borne into the world as an author; and if ever my
head touched the stars while I walked upon the earth, it was then.... In
all London there was not so vain, so happy, so elated a creature as I
was that day.” From that starry altitude he soon descended. The subject
of an early number of _The Flagellant_ was flogging; the writer was
Robert Southey. He was full of Gibbon at the time, and had caught some of
Voltaire’s manner of poignant irony. Rather for disport of his wits than
in the character of a reformer, the writer of number five undertook to
prove from the ancients and the Fathers that flogging was an invention of
the devil. During Southey’s life the devil received many insults at his
hands; his horns, his hoofs, his teeth, his tail, his moral character,
were painfully referred to; and the devil took it, like a sensible
fiend, in good part. Not so Dr. Vincent; the preceptorial dignity was
impugned by some unmannerly brat; a bulwark of the British Constitution
was at stake. Dr. Vincent made haste to prosecute the publisher for
libel. Matters having taken unexpectedly so serious a turn, Southey
came forward, avowed himself the writer, and, with some sense of shame
in yielding to resentment so unwarranted and so dull, he offered his
apology. The head-master’s wrath still held on its way, and Southey was
privately expelled.

All Southey’s truant hours were not passed among folios adorned with
strange sculptures. In those days even St. Peter’s College, Westminster,
could be no little landlocked bay—silent, secure, and dull. To be in
London was to be among the tides and breakers of the world. Every post
brought news of some startling or significant event. Now it was that
George Washington had been elected first President of the American
Republic; now that the States-General were assembled at Versailles; now
that Paris, delivered from her nightmare towers of the Bastille, breathed
free; now that Brissot was petitioning for dethronement. The main issues
of the time were such as to try the spirits. Southey, who was aspiring,
hopeful, and courageous, did not hesitate in choosing a side; a new dawn
was opening for the world, and should not his heart have its portion in
that dawn?

The love of our own household which surrounds us like the air, and
which seems inevitable as our daily meat and drink, acquires a strange
preciousness when we find that the world can be harsh. The expelled
Westminster boy returned to Bristol, and faithful Aunt Tyler welcomed him
home; Shad did not avert his face, and Phillis looked up at him with her
soft spaniel eyes. But Bristol also had its troubles; the world had been
too strong for the poor linen-draper in Wine Street; he had struggled to
maintain his business, but without success; his fortune was now broken,
and his heart broke with it. In some respects it was well for Southey
that his father’s affairs gave him definite realities to attend to; for,
in the quiet and vacancy of the days in Miss Tyler’s house, his heart
took unusual heats and chills, and even his eager verse-writing could
not allay the excitement nor avert the despondent fit. When Michaelmas
came, Southey went up to Oxford to matriculate; it was intended that he
should enter at Christ Church, but the dean had heard of the escapade at
Westminster; there was a laying of big-wigs together over that adventure,
and the young rebel was rejected; to be received, however, by Balliol
College. But to Southey it mattered little at the time whether he were of
this college or of that; a summons had reached him to hasten to Bristol
that he might follow his father’s body to the grave, and now his thoughts
could not but cling to his mother in her sorrow and her need.

“I left Westminster,” says Southey, “in a perilous state—a heart full of
poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther, and my religious
principles shaken by Gibbon: many circumstances tended to give me a wrong
bias, none to lead me right, except adversity, the wholesomest of all
discipline.” The young republican went up to chambers in Rat Castle—since
departed—near the head of Balliol Grove, prepared to find in Oxford the
seat of pedantry, prejudice, and aristocracy; an airy sense of his own
enlightenment and emancipation possessed him. He has to learn to pay
respect to men “remarkable only for great wigs and little wisdom.” He
finds it “rather disgraceful at the moment when Europe is on fire with
freedom—when man and monarch are contending—to sit and study Euclid
and Hugo Grotius.” Beside the enthusiasm proper in Southey’s nature,
there was at this time an enthusiasm prepense. He had learnt from his
foreign masters the language of hyper-sensibility; his temperament was
nervous and easily wrought upon; his spirit was generous and ardent.
Like other youths with a facile literary talent before finding his true
self, he created a number of artificial selves, who uttered for him
his moralizings and philosophizings, who declaimed for him on liberty,
who dictated long letters of sentimental platitudes, and who built up
dream-fabrics of social and political reforms, chiefly for the pleasure
of seeing how things might look in “the brilliant colours of fancy,
nature, and Rousseau.” In this there was no insincerity, though there
was some unreality. “For life,” he says, “I have really a very strong
predilection,” and the buoyant energy within him delayed the discovery
of the bare facts of existence; it was so easy and enjoyable to become
in turn sage, reformer, and enthusiast. Or perhaps we ought to say that
all this time there was a real Robert Southey, strong, upright, ardent,
simple; and although this was quite too plain a person to serve the
purposes of epistolary literature, it was he who gave their cues to the
various ideal personages. This, at least, may be affirmed—all Southey’s
unrealities were of a pure and generous cast; never was his life emptied
of truth and meaning, and made in the deepest degree phantasmal by a
secret shame lurking under a fair show. The youth Milton, with his
grave upbringing, was happily not in the way of catching the trick of
sentimental phrases; but even Milton at Cambridge, the lady of his
College, was not more clean from spot or blemish than was Southey amid
the vulgar riot and animalisms of young Oxford.

Two influences came to the aid of Southey’s instinctive modesty, and
confirmed him in all that was good. One was his friendship with Edmund
Seward, too soon taken from him by death. The other was his discipleship
to a great master of conduct. One in our own day has acknowledged the
largeness of his debt to

“That halting slave, who in Nicopolis
Taught Arrian, when Vespasian’s brutal son
Clear’d Rome of what most shamed him.”

Epictetus came to Southey precisely when such a master was needed; other
writers had affected him through his imagination, through his nervous
sensibility; they had raised around him a luminous haze; they had plunged
him deeper in illusion. Now was heard the voice of a conscience speaking
to a conscience; the manner of speech was grave, unfigured, calm; above
all, it was real, and the words bore in upon the hearer’s soul with
a quiet resistlessness. He had allowed his sensitiveness to set up
what excitements it might please in his whole moral frame; he had been
squandering his emotions; he had been indulging in a luxury and waste of
passion. Here was a tonic and a styptic. Had Southey been declamatory
about freedom? The bondsman Epictetus spoke of freedom also, and of how
it might be obtained. Epictetus, like Rousseau, told of a life according
to nature; he commended simplicity of manners. But Rousseau’s simplicity,
notwithstanding that homage which he paid to the will, seemed to heat the
atmosphere with strange passion, seemed to give rise to new curiosities
and refinements of self-conscious emotion. Epictetus showed how life
could be simplified, indeed, by bringing it into obedience to a perfect
law. Instead of a quietism haunted by feverish dreams—duty, action,
co-operation with God. “Twelve years ago,” wrote Southey in 1806, “I
carried Epictetus in my pocket till my very heart was ingrained with it,
as a pig’s bones become red by feeding him upon madder. And the longer
I live, and the more I learn, the more am I convinced that Stoicism,
properly understood, is the best and noblest of systems.” Much that
Southey gained from Stoicism he kept throughout his whole life, tempered,
indeed, by the influences of a Christian faith, but not lost. He was no
metaphysician, and a master who had placed metaphysics first and morals
after would hardly have won him for a disciple; but a lofty ethical
doctrine spoke to what was deepest and most real in his nature. To trust
in an over-ruling Providence, to accept the disposal of events not in our
own power with a strenuous loyalty to our Supreme Ruler, to hold loose by
all earthly possessions even the dearest, to hold loose by life itself
while putting it to fullest use—these lessons he first learnt from the
Stoic slave, and he forgot none of them. But his chief lesson was the
large one of self-regulation, that it is a man’s prerogative to apply the
reason and the will to the government of conduct and to the formation of
character.

By the routine of lectures and examinations Southey profited little; he
was not driven into active revolt, and that was all. His tutor, half a
democrat, surprised him by praising America, and asserting the right
of every country to model its own forms of government. He added, with
a pleasing frankness which deserves to be imitated, “Mr. Southey, you
won’t learn anything by my lectures, sir; so, if you have any studies of
your own, you had better pursue them.” Of all the months of his life,
those passed at Oxford, Southey declared, were the most unprofitable.
“All I learnt was a little swimming ... and a little boating.... I never
remember to have dreamt of Oxford—a sure proof how little it entered
into my moral being; of school, on the contrary, I dream perpetually.”
The miscellaneous society of workers, idlers, dunces, bucks, men of
muscle and men of money, did not please him; he lacked what Wordsworth
calls “the congregating temper that pervades our unripe years.” One
or two friends he chose, and grappled them to his heart; above all,
Seward, who abridged his hours of sleep for sake of study—whose drink was
water, whose breakfast was dry bread; then, Wynn and Lightfoot. With
Seward he sallied forth, in the Easter vacation, 1793, for a holiday
excursion; passed, with “the stupidity of a democratic philosopher,” the
very walls of Blenheim, without turning from the road to view the ducal
palace; lingered at Evesham, and wandered through its ruined Abbey,
indulging in some passable mediæval romancing; reached Worcester and
Kidderminster. “We returned by Bewdley. There is an old mansion, once
Lord Herbert’s, now mouldering away, in so romantic a situation, that
I soon lost myself in dreams of days of yore: the tapestried room—the
listed fight—the vassal-filled hall—the hospitable fire—the old baron
and his young daughter—these formed a most delightful day-dream.” The
youthful democrat did not suspect that such day-dreams were treasonable—a
hazardous caressing of the wily enchantress of the past; in his pocket he
carried Milton’s _Defence_, which may have been his amulet of salvation.
Many and various elements could mingle in young brains a-seethe with
revolution and romanticism. The fresh air and quickened blood at least
put Southey into excellent spirits. “We must walk over Scotland; it will
be an adventure to delight us all the remainder of our lives: we will
wander over the hills of Morven, and mark the driving blast, perchance
bestrodden by the spirit of Ossian!”

Among visitors to the Wye, in July, 1793, were William Wordsworth,
recently returned from France, and Robert Southey, holiday-making from
Oxford; they were probably unacquainted with each other at that time even
by name. Wordsworth has left an undying memorial of his tour in the poem
written near Tintern Abbey, five years later. Southey was drawing a long
breath before he uttered himself in some thousands of blank verses. The
father of his friend Bedford resided at Brixton Causeway, about four
miles on the Surrey side of London; the smoke of the great city hung
heavily beyond an intervening breadth of country; shady lanes led to the
neighbouring villages; the garden was a sunny solitude where flowers
opened and fruit grew mellow, and bees and birds were happy. Here Southey
visited his friend; his nineteenth birthday came; on the following
morning he planted himself at the desk in the garden summer-house;
morning after morning quickly passed; and by the end of six weeks _Joan
of Arc_, an epic poem in twelve books, was written. To the subject
Southey was attracted primarily by the exalted character of his heroine;
but apart from this it possessed a twofold interest for him: England,
in 1793, was engaged in a war against France—a war hateful to all who
sympathized with the Republic; Southey’s epic was a celebration of the
glories of French patriotism, a narrative of victory over the invader.
It was also chivalric and mediæval; the sentiment which was transforming
the word Gothic, from a term of reproach to a word of vague yet mastering
fascination, found expression in the young poet’s treatment of the story
of Joan of Arc. Knight and hermit, prince and prelate, doctors seraphic
and irrefragable with their pupils, meet in it; the castle and the
cathedral confront one another: windows gleam with many-coloured light
streaming through the rich robes of saint and prophet; a miracle of
carven tracery branches overhead; upon the altar burns the mystic lamp.

The rough draft of _Joan_ was hardly laid aside when Southey’s sympathies
with the revolutionary movement in France, strained already to the utmost
point of tension, were fatally rent. All his faith, all his hope, were
given to the Girondin party; and from the Girondins he had singled out
Brissot as his ideal of political courage, purity and wisdom. Brissot,
like himself, was a disciple of Jean Jacques; his life was austere; he
had suffered on behalf of freedom. On the day when the Bastille was
stormed its keys were placed in Brissot’s hands; it was Brissot who had
determined that war should be declared against the foreign foes of the
Republic. But now the Girondins—following hard upon Marie Antoinette—were
in the death-carts; they chanted their last hymn of liberty, ever growing
fainter while the axe lopped head after head; and Brissot was among the
martyrs (October 31, 1793). Probably no other public event so deeply
affected Southey. “I am sick of the world,” he writes, “and discontented
with every one in it. The murder of Brissot has completely harrowed up
my faculties.... I look round the world, and everywhere find the same
spectacle—the strong tyrannizing over the weak, man and beast.... There
is no place for virtue.”

After this, though Southey did not lose faith in democratic principles,
he averted his eyes for a time from France: how could he look to
butchers who had shed blood which was the very life of liberty, for the
realization of his dreams? And whither should he look? Had he but ten
thousand republicans like himself, they might repeople Greece and expel
the Turk. Being but one, might not Cowley’s fancy, a cottage in America,
be transformed into a fact: “three rooms ... and my only companion some
poor negro whom I have bought on purpose to emancipate?” Meanwhile he
occupied a room in Aunt Tyler’s house, and, instead of swinging the axe
in some forest primeval, amused himself with splitting a wedge of oak in
company with Shad, who might, perhaps, serve for the emancipated negro.
Moreover, he was very diligently driving his quill: “I have finished
transcribing _Joan_, and have bound her in marble paper with green
ribbons, and am now copying all my remainables to carry to Oxford. Then
once more a clear field, and then another epic poem, and then another.”
Appalling announcement! “I have accomplished a most arduous task,
transcribing all my verses that appear worth the trouble, except letters.
Of these I took one list—another of my pile of stuff and nonsense—and a
third of what I have burnt and lost; upon an average 10,000 verses are
burnt and lost; the same number preserved, and 15,000 worthless.” Such
sad mechanic exercise dulled the ache in Southey’s heart; still “the
visions of futurity,” he finds, “are dark and gloomy, and the only ray
that enlivens the scene beams on America.”

To Balliol Southey returned; and if the future of the world seemed
perplexing, so also did his individual future. His school and college
expenses were borne by Mrs. Southey’s brother, the Rev. Herbert Hill,
chaplain to the British Factory at Lisbon. In him the fatherless youth
found one who was both a friend and a father. Holbein’s portrait of Sir
Thomas More in his best years might have passed for that of Mr. Hill;
there was the same benign thoughtfulness in his aspect, the same earnest
calm, the same brightness and quietness, the same serene and cheerful
strength. He was generous and judicious, learned and modest, and his
goodness carried authority with it. Uncle Hill’s plan had been that
Southey, like himself, should become an English clergyman. But though
he might have preached from an Unitarian pulpit, Southey could not take
upon himself the vows of a minister of the Church of England. It would
have instantly relieved his mother had he entered into orders. He longed
that this were possible, and went through many conflicts of mind, and
not a little anguish. “God knows I would exchange every intellectual gift
which He has blessed me with, for implicit faith to have been able to do
this;” but it could not be. To bear the reproaches, gentle yet grave, of
his uncle was hard; to grieve his mother was harder. Southey resolved to
go to the anatomy school, and fit himself to be a doctor. But he could
not overcome his strong repugnance to the dissecting-room; it expelled
him whether he would or no; and all the time literature, with still yet
audible voice, was summoning him. Might he not obtain some official
employment in London, and also pursue his true calling? Beside the desire
of pleasing his uncle and of aiding his mother, the Stoic of twenty had
now a stronger motive for seeking some immediate livelihood. “I shall
joyfully bid adieu to Oxford,” he writes, “ ... and, when I know my
situation, unite myself to a woman whom I have long esteemed as a sister,
and for whom I now indulge a warmer sentiment.” But Southey’s reputation
as a dangerous Jacobin stood in his way; how could his Oxford overseers
answer for the good behaviour of a youth who spoke scornfully of Pitt?

The shuttles of the fates now began to fly faster, and the threads to
twist and twine. It was June of the year 1794. A visitor from Cambridge
was one day introduced to Southey; he seemed to be of an age near his
own; his hair, parted in the middle, fell wavy upon his neck; his face,
when the brooding cloud was not upon him, was bright with an abundant
promise—a promise vaguely told in lines of the sweet full lips, in the
luminous eyes, and the forehead that was like a god’s. This meeting of
Southey and Coleridge was an event which decided much in the careers of
both. In the summer days and in youth, the meeting-time of spirits,
they were drawn close to one another. Both had confessions to make,
with many points in common; both were poets; both were democrats; both
had hoped largely from France, and the hopes of both had been darkened;
both were uncertain what part to take in life. We do not know whether
Coleridge quickly grew so confidential as to tell of his recent adventure
as Silas Titus Comberbatch of the 15th Light Dragoons. But we know that
Coleridge had a lively admiration for the tall Oxford student—a person
of distinction, so dignified, so courteous, so quick of apprehension, so
full of knowledge, with a glance so rapid and piercing, with a smile so
good and kind. And we know that Coleridge lost no time in communicating
to Southey the hopes that were nearest to his heart.

Pantisocracy, word of magic, summed up these hopes. Was it not possible
for a number of men like themselves, whose way of thinking was liberal,
whose characters were tried and incorruptible, to join together and leave
this old world of falling thrones and rival anarchies, for the woods and
wilds of the young republic? One could wield an axe, another could guide
a plough. Their wants would be simple and natural; their toil need not
be such as the slaves of luxury endure; where possessions were held in
common, each would work for all; in their cottages the best books would
have a place; literature and science, bathed anew in the invigorating
stream of life and nature, could not but rise reanimated and purified.
Each young man should take to himself a mild and lovely woman for his
wife; it would be her part to prepare their innocent food, and tend
their hardy and beautiful race. So they would bring back the patriarchal
age, and in the sober evening of life they would behold “colonies of
independence in the undivided dale of industry.” All the arguments
in favour of such a scheme could not be set forth in a conversation,
but Coleridge, to silence objectors, would publish a quarto volume on
Pantisocracy and Aspheterism.

Southey heartily assented; his own thoughts had, with a vague
forefeeling, been pointing to America; the unpublished epic would serve
to buy a spade, a plough, a few acres of ground; he could assuredly split
timber; he knew a mild and lovely woman for whom he indulged a warmer
sentiment than that of a brother. Robert Lovell, a Quaker, an enthusiast,
a poet, married to the sister of Southey’s Edith, would surely join them;
so would Burnett, his college friend; so, perhaps, would the admirable
Seward. The long vacation was at hand. Being unable to take orders or to
endure the horrors of the dissecting-room, Southey must no longer remain
a burden upon his uncle; he would quit the university and prepare for the
voyage.

Coleridge departed to tramp it through the romantic valleys and mountains
of Wales. Southey joined his mother, who now lived at Bath, and her he
soon persuaded—as a handsome and eloquent son can persuade a loving
mother—that the plan of emigration was feasible; she even consented to
accompany her boy. But his aunt—an _esprit borné_—was not to hear a
breath of Pantisocracy; still less would it be prudent to confess to
her his engagement to Miss Edith Fricker. His Edith was penniless and
therefore all the dearer to Southey; her father had been an unsuccessful
manufacturer of sugar-pans. What would Miss Tyler, the friend of Lady
Bateman, feel? What words, what gestures, what acts, would give her
feelings relief?

When Coleridge, after his Welsh wanderings, arrived in Bristol, he was
introduced to Lovell, to Mrs. Lovell, to Mrs. Lovell’s sisters, Edith
and Sarah, and Martha and Elizabeth. Mrs. Lovell was doubtless already
a pantisocrat; Southey had probably not found it difficult to convert
Edith; Sarah, the elder sister, who was wont to look a mild reproof on
over-daring speculations, seriously inclined to hear of pantisocracy from
the lips of Coleridge. All members of the community were to be married.
Coleridge now more than ever saw the propriety of that rule; he was
prepared to yield obedience to it with the least possible delay. Burnett,
also a pantisocrat, must also marry. Would Miss Martha Fricker join the
community as Mrs. George Burnett? The lively little woman refused him
scornfully; if he wanted a wife in a hurry, let him go elsewhere. The
prospects of the reformers, this misadventure notwithstanding, from day
to day grew brighter. “This Pantisocratic scheme,” so writes Southey,
“has given me new life, new hope, new energy; all the faculties of my
mind are dilated.” Coleridge met a friend of Priestley’s. But a few days
since he had toasted the great doctor at Bala, thereby calling forth a
sentiment from the loyal parish apothecary: “I gives a sentiment, gemmen!
May all republicans be gulloteened!” The friend of Priestley’s said
that without doubt the doctor would join them. An American land-agent
told them that for twelve men 2000_l._ would do. “He recommends the
Susquehanna, from its excessive beauty and its security from hostile
Indians.” The very name—Susquehanna—sounded as if it were the sweetest of
rippling rivers. Money, it is true, as Southey admits, “is a huge evil;”
but now they are twenty-seven, and by resolute men this difficulty can be
overcome.

It was evening of the 17th of October, a dark and gusty evening of
falling rain and miry ways. Within Aunt Tyler’s house in College
Green, Bristol, a storm was bursting; she had heard it all at
last—Pantisocracy, America, Miss Fricker. Out of the house he must march;
there was the door; let her never see his face again. Southey took his
hat, looked for the last time in his life at his aunt then stepped out
into the darkness and the rain. “Why sir, you ben’t going to Bath at
this time of night and in this weather?” remonstrated poor Shadrach.
Even so; and with a friendly whisper master and man parted. Southey had
not a penny in his pocket, and was lightly clad. At Lovell’s he luckily
found his father’s great-coat; he swallowed a glass of brandy and set off
on foot. Misery makes one acquainted with strange road-fellows. On the
way he came upon an old man, drunk, and hardly able to stumble forward
through the night: the young pantisocrat, mindful of his fellow-man,
dragged him along nine miles amid rain and mire. Then, with weary feet,
he reached Bath and there was his mother to greet him with surprise, and
to ask for explanations. “Oh, Patience, Patience, thou hast often helped
poor Robert Southey, but never didst thou stand him in more need than on
Friday, the 17th of October, 1794.”

For a little longer the bow of hope shone in the West somewhere over
the Susquehanna, and then it gradually grew faint and faded. Money,
that huge evil, sneered its cold negations. The chiefs consulted, and
Southey proposed that a house and farm should be taken in Wales where
their principles might be acted out until better days enabled them to
start upon their voyage. One pantisocrat at least, could be happy with
Edith, brown bread, and wild Welsh raspberries. But Coleridge objected;
their principles could not be fairly tested under the disadvantage of an
effete and adverse social state surrounding them; besides, where was the
purchase-money to come from? how were they to live until the gathering
of their first crops? It became clear that the realization of their plan
must be postponed. The immediate problem was, How to raise 150_l._? With
such a sum they might both qualify by marriage for membership in the
pantisocratical community. After that, the rest would somehow follow.

How, then, to raise 150_l._? Might they not start a new magazine and
become joint editors? The _Telegraph_ had offered employment to Southey.
“Hireling writer to a newspaper! ’Sdeath! ’tis an ugly title; but
_n’importe_. I shall write truth, and only truth.” The offer, however,
turned out to be that of a reporter’s place; and his troublesome guest,
honesty, prevented his contributing to _The True Briton_. But he and
Coleridge could at least write poetry, and perhaps publish it with
advantage to themselves; and they could lecture to a Bristol audience.
With some skirmishing lectures on various political subjects of immediate
interest, Coleridge began; many came to hear them, and the applause
was loud. Thus encouraged, he announced and delivered two remarkable
courses of lectures—one, _A Comparative View of the English Rebellion
under Charles I. and the French Revolution_; the other, _On Revealed
Religion: its Corruptions and its Political Views_. Southey did not feel
tempted to discuss the origin of evil or the principles of revolution.
He chose as his subject a view of the course of European history from
Solon and Lycurgus to the American War. His hearers were pleased by the
graceful delivery and unassuming self-possession of the young lecturer,
and were quick to recognize the unusual range of his knowledge, his just
perception of facts, his ardour and energy of conviction. One lecture
Coleridge begged permission to deliver in Southey’s place—that on the
Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Roman Empire. Southey consented, and
the room was thronged but no lecturer appeared; they waited; still no
lecturer. Southey offered an apology, and the crowd dispersed in no happy
temper. It is likely, adds that good old gossip Cottle, who tells the
story, “that at this very moment Mr. Coleridge might have been found at
No. 48 College Street, composedly smoking his pipe, and lost in profound
musing on his divine Susquehanna.”

The good Cottle—young in 1795, a publisher, and unhappily a poet—rendered
more important service to the two young men than that of smoothing down
their ruffled tempers after this incident. Southey, in conjunction with
Lovell, had already published a slender volume of verse. The pieces by
Southey recall his schoolboy joys and sorrows, and tell of his mother’s
tears, his father’s death, his friendship with “Urban,” his love of
“Ariste,” lovely maid! his delight in old romance, his discipleship
to Rousseau. They are chiefly of interest as exhibiting the diverse
literary influences to which a young writer of genius was exposed in
the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Here the couplet of Pope
reappears, and hard by the irregular ode as practised by Akenside, the
elegy as written by Gray, the unrhymed stanza which Collins’s _Evening_
made a fashion, the sonnet to which Bowles had lent a meditative
grace and the rhymeless measures imitated by Southey from Sayers, and
afterwards made popular by his _Thalaba_. On the last page of this
volume appear “Proposals for publishing by subscription _Joan of Arc_;”
but subscriptions came slowly in. One evening Southey read for Cottle
some books of _Joan_. “It can rarely happen,” he writes “that a young
author should meet with a bookseller as inexperienced and as ardent as
himself.” Cottle offered to publish the poem in quarto, to make it the
handsomest book ever printed in Bristol, to give the author fifty copies
for his subscribers, and fifty pounds to put forthwith into his purse.
Some dramatic attempts had recently been made by Southey, _Wat Tyler_, of
which we shall hear more at a later date, and the _Fall of Robespierre_,
undertaken by Coleridge, Lovell, and Southey, half in sport—each being
pledged to produce an act in twenty-four hours. These were now forgotten,
and all his energies were given to revising and in part recasting _Joan_.
In six weeks his epic had been written; its revision occupied six months.

With summer came a great sorrow, and in the end of autumn a measureless
joy. “He is dead,” Southey writes, “my dear Edmund Seward! after six
weeks’ suffering.... You know not, Grosvenor, how I loved poor Edmund:
he taught me all that I have of good.... There is a strange vacancy
in my heart.... I have lost a friend, and such a one!” And then
characteristically come the words: “I will try, by assiduous employment,
to get rid of very melancholy thoughts.” Another consolation Southey
possessed: during his whole life he steadfastly believed that death is
but the removal of a spirit from earth to heaven; and heaven for him
meant a place where cheerful familiarity was natural, where, perhaps,
he himself would write more epics and purchase more folios. As Baxter
expected to meet among the saints above Mr. Hampden and Mr. Pym, so
Southey counted upon the pleasure of having long talks with friends,
of obtaining introductions to eminent strangers; above all, he looked
forward to the joy of again embracing his beloved ones:

“Often together have we talked of death;
How sweet it were to see
All doubtful things made clear;
How sweet it were with powers
Such as the Cherubim
To view the depth of Heaven!
O Edmund! thou hast first
Begun the travel of eternity.”

Autumn brought its happiness pure and deep. Mr. Hill had arrived from
Lisbon; once again he urged his nephew to enter the church; but for one
of Southey’s opinions the church-gate “is perjury,” nor does he even find
church-going the best mode of spending his Sunday. He proposed to choose
the law as his profession. But his uncle had heard of Pantisocracy,
Aspheterism, and Miss Fricker, and said the law could wait; he should
go abroad for six months, see Spain and Portugal, learn foreign
languages, read foreign poetry and history, rummage among the books and
manuscripts his uncle had collected in Lisbon, and afterwards return to
his Blackstone. Southey, straightforward in all else, in love became
a Machiavel. To Spain and Portugal he would go; his mother wished it;
Cottle expected from him a volume of travels; his uncle had but to name
the day. Then he sought Edith, and asked her to promise that before he
departed she would become his wife: she wept to think that he was going,
and yet persuaded him to go; consented, finally, to all that he proposed.
But how was he to pay the marriage fees and buy the wedding-ring? Often
this autumn he had walked the streets dinnerless, no pence in his pocket,
no bread and cheese at his lodgings, thinking little, however, of dinner,
for his head was full of poetry and his heart of love. Cottle lent him
money for the ring and the license—and Southey in after-years never
forgot the kindness of his honest friend. He was to accompany his uncle,
but Edith was first to be his own; so she may honourably accept from
him whatever means he can furnish for her support. It was arranged with
Cottle’s sisters that she should live with them, and still call herself
by her maiden name. On the morning of the 14th of November, 1795—a day
sad, yet with happiness underlying all sadness—Robert Southey was married
in Redcliffe Church, Bristol, to Edith Fricker. At the church door there
was a pressure of hands, and they parted with full hearts, silently—Mrs.
Southey to take up her abode in Bristol, with the wedding-ring upon her
breast, her husband to cross the sea. Never did woman put her happiness
in more loyal keeping.

So by love and by poetry, by Edith Fricker and by Joan of Arc, Southey’s
life was being shaped. Powers most benign leaned forward to brood over
the coming years and to bless them. It was decreed that his heart should
be no homeless wanderer; that, as seasons went by, children should be in
his arms and upon his knees: it was also decreed that he should become
a strong toiler among books. Now Pantisocracy looked faint and far; the
facts plain and enduring of the actual world took hold of his adult
spirit. And Coleridge complained of this, and did not come to bid his
friend farewell.

CHAPTER III.

WANDERINGS, 1795-1803.

Through pastoral Somerset, through Devon amid falling leaves, then
over rough Cornish roads, the coach brought Southey—cold, hungry, and
dispirited—to Falmouth. No packet there for Corunna; no packet starting
before December 1st. The gap of time looked colourless and dreary, nor
could even the philosophy of Epictetus lift him quite above “the things
independent of the will.” After a comfortless and stormy voyage, on the
fifth morning the sun shone, and through a mist the barren cliffs of
Galicia, with breakers tumbling at their feet, rose in sight. Who has
not experienced, when first he has touched a foreign soil, how nature
purges the visual nerve with lucky euphrasy? The shadowy streets, the
latticed houses, the fountains, the fragments of Moorish architecture,
the Jewish faces of the men, the lustrous eyes of girls, the children
gaily bedizened, the old witch-like women with brown shrivelled parchment
for skin, told Southey that he was far from home. Nor at night was he
permitted to forget his whereabouts; out of doors cats were uttering soft
things in most vile Spanish; beneath his blanket, familiars, bloodthirsty
as those of the Inquisition, made him their own. He was not sorry when
the crazy coach, drawn by six mules, received him and his uncle, and the
journey eastward began to the shout of the muleteers and the clink of a
hundred bells.

Some eighteen days were spent upon the road to Madrid. Had Southey not
left half his life behind him in Bristol, those December days would
have been almost wholly pleasurable. As it was, they yielded a large
possession for the inner eye, and gave his heart a hold upon this new
land which, in a certain sense, became for ever after the land of
his adoption. It was pleasant when, having gone forward on foot, he
reached the crest of some mountain road, to look down on broken waters
in the glen, and across to the little white-walled convent amid its
chestnuts, and back to the dim ocean; there, on the summit, to rest with
the odour of furze blossoms and the tinkle of goats in the air, and,
while the mules wound up the long ascent, to turn all this into hasty
rhymes, ending with the thought of peace, and love, and Edith. Then the
bells audibly approaching, and the loud-voiced muleteer consigning his
struggling team to Saint Michael and three hundred devils; and then on to
remoter hills, or moor and swamp, or the bridge flung across a ravine,
or the path above a precipice, with mist and moonlight below. And next
day some walled city, with its decaying towers and dim piazza; some
church, with its balcony of ghastly skulls; some abandoned castle, or
jasper-pillared Moorish gateway and gallery. Nor were the little inns and
baiting-houses without compensations for their manifold discomforts. The
Spanish country-folk were dirty and ignorant, but they had a courtesy
unknown to English peasants; Southey would join the group around the
kitchen fire, and be, as far as his imperfect speech allowed, one with
the rustics, the carriers, the hostess, the children, the village barber,
the familiar priest, and the familiar pigs. When chambermaid Josepha
took hold of his hair and gravely advised him never to tie it or to
wear powder, she meant simple friendliness, no more. In his recoil from
the dream of human perfectibility, Southey allowed himself at times to
square accounts with common-sense by a cynical outbreak; but, in truth,
he was a warm-hearted lover of his kind. Even feudalism and Catholicism
had not utterly degraded the Spaniard. Southey thanks God that the pride
of chivalry is extinguished; his Protestant zeal becomes deep-dyed in
presence of our Lady of Seven Sorrows and the Holy Napkin. “Here, in
the words of Mary Wollstonecraft,” he writes, “‘the serious folly of
Superstition stares every man of sense in the face.’” Yet Spain has
inherited tender and glorious memories; by the river Ezla he recalls
Montemayor’s wooing of his Diana; at Tordesillas he muses on the spot
where Queen Joanna watched by her husband’s corpse, and where Padilla,
Martyr of Freedom, triumphed and endured. At length the travellers,
accompanied by Manuel, the most vivacious and accomplished of barbers,
drew near Madrid, passed the miles of kneeling washerwomen and outspread
clothes on the river banks, entered the city, put up at the Cruz de
Malta, and were not ill-content to procure once more a well-cooked supper
and a clean bed.

Southey pursued with ardour his study of the Spanish language, and could
soon talk learnedly of its great writers. The national theatres, and
the sorry spectacle of bullock-teasing, made a slighter impression upon
him than did the cloisters of the new Franciscan Convent. He had been
meditating his design of a series of poems to illustrate the mythologies
of the world; here the whole portentous history of St. Francis was
displayed upon the walls. “Do they believe all this, sir?” he asked Mr.
Hill. “Yes, and a great deal more of the same kind,” was the reply. “My
first thought was ... here is a mythology not less wild and fanciful
than any of those upon which my imagination was employed, and one which
ought to be included in my ambitious design.” Thus Southey’s attention
was drawn for the first time to the legendary and monastic history of the
Church.

His Majesty of Spain, with his courtesans and his courtiers, possibly
also with the Queen and her gallants, had gone westward to meet the
Portuguese court upon the borders. As a matter of course, therefore,
no traveller could hope to leave Madrid, every carriage, cart, horse,
mule, and ass being embargoed for the royal service. The followers of
the father of his people numbered seven thousand, and they advanced,
devouring all before them, neither paying nor promising to pay, leaving a
broad track behind as bare as that stripped by an army of locusts, with
here a weeping cottager, and there a smoking cork-tree, for a memorial of
their march. Ten days after the king’s departure, Mr. Hill and his nephew
succeeded in finding a buggy with two mules, and made their escape,
taking with them their own larder. Their destination was Lisbon, and
as they drew towards the royal party, the risk of embargo added a zest
to travel hardly less piquant than that imparted by the neighbourhood
of bandits. It was mid-January; the mountains shone with snow; but
olive-gathering had begun in the plains; violets were in blossom, and in
the air was a genial warmth. As they drove south and west, the younger
traveller noted for his diary the first appearance of orange-trees, the
first myrtle, the first fence of aloes. A pressure was on their spirits
till Lisbon should be reached; they would not linger to watch the sad
procession attending a body uncovered upon its bier; they left behind
the pilgrims to our Lady’s Shrine, pious bacchanals half naked and half
drunk, advancing to the tune of bagpipe and drum; then the gleam of
waters before them, a rough two hours’ passage, and the weary heads were
on their pillows, to be roused before morning by an earthquake, with its
sudden trembling and cracking.

Life at Lisbon was not altogether after Southey’s heart. His uncle’s
books and manuscripts were indeed a treasure to explore, but Mr. Hill
lived in society as well as in his study, and thought it right to give
his nephew the advantage of new acquaintances. What had the author of
_Joan of Arc_, the husband of Edith Southey, the disciple of Rousseau, of
Godwin, the Stoic, the tall, dark-eyed young man with a certain wildness
of expression in his face, standing alone or discoursing earnestly on
Industrial Communities of Women—what had he to do with the _inania
regna_ of the drawing-room? He cared not for cards nor for dancing; he
possessed no gift for turning the leaves on the harpsichord, and saying
the happy word at the right moment. Southey, indeed, knew as little as
possible of music; and all through his life acted on the principle that
the worthiest use of sound without sense had been long ago discovered
by schoolboys let loose from their tasks; he loved to create a chaos of
sheer noise after those hours during which silence had been interrupted
only by the scraping of his pen. For the rest, the sallies of glee from a
mountain brook, the piping of a thrush from the orchard-bough, would have
delighted him more than all the trills of Sontag or the finest rapture
of Malibran. It was with some of the superiority and seriousness of a
philosopher just out of his teens that he unbent to the frivolities of
the Lisbon drawing-rooms.

But if Lisbon had its vexations, the country, the climate, the mountains
with their streams and coolness, the odorous gardens, Tagus flashing
in the sunlight, the rough bar glittering with white breakers, and the
Atlantic, made amends. When April came, Mr. Hill moved to his house at
Cintra, and the memories and sensations “felt in the blood and felt
along the heart,” which Southey brought with him to England, were
especially associated with this delightful retreat. “Never was a house
more completely secluded than my uncle’s: it is so surrounded with
lemon-trees and laurels as nowhere to be visible at the distance of ten
yards.... A little stream of water runs down the hill before the door,
another door opens into a lemon-garden, and from the sitting-room we have
just such a prospect over lemon-trees and laurels to an opposite hill
as, by promising a better, invites us to walk.... On one of the mountain
eminences stands the Penha Convent, visible from the hills near Lisbon.
On another are the ruins of a Moorish castle, and a cistern, within its
boundaries, kept always full by a spring of purest water that rises in
it. From this elevation the eye stretches over a bare and melancholy
country to Lisbon on the one side, and on the other to the distant
Convent of Mafra, the Atlantic bounding the greater part of the prospect.
I never beheld a view that so effectually checked the wish of wandering.”

“Lisbon, from which God grant me a speedy deliverance,” is the heading of
one of Southey’s letters; but when the day came to look on Lisbon perhaps
for the last time, his heart grew heavy with happy recollection. It was
with no regretful feeling, however, that he leaped ashore, glad, after
all, to exchange the sparkling Tagus and the lemon groves of Portugal for
the mud-encumbered tide of Avon and a glimpse of British smoke. “I intend
to write a hymn,” he says, “to the Dii Penates.” His joy in reunion
with his wife was made more rare and tender by finding her in sorrow;
the grief was also peculiarly his own—Lovell was dead. He had been taken
ill at Salisbury, and by his haste to reach his fireside had heightened
the fever which hung upon him. Coleridge, writing to his friend Poole
at this time, expresses himself with amiable but inactive piety: “The
widow is calm, and amused with her beautiful infant. We are all become
more religious than we were. God be ever praised for all things.” Southey
also writes characteristically: “Poor Lovell! I am in hopes of raising
something for his widow by publishing his best pieces, if only enough
to buy her a harpsichord.... Will you procure me some subscribers?” No
idle conceit of serving her; for Mrs. Lovell with her child, as well
as Mrs. Coleridge with her children, at a later time became members of
the Southey household. Already—though Coleridge might resent it—Southey
was willing to part with some vague enthusiasms which wandered in the
inane of a young man’s fancy, for the sake of simple loyalties and manly
tendernesses. No one was more boyish-hearted than Southey at fifty; but
even at twenty-two it would not have been surprising to find grey hairs
sprinkling the dark. “How does time mellow down our opinions! Little
of that ardent enthusiasm which so lately fevered my whole character
remains. I have contracted my sphere of action within the little circle
of my own friends, and even my wishes seldom stray beyond it.... I want
a little room to arrange my books in, and some Lares of my own.” This
domestic feeling was not a besotted contentment in narrow interests; no
man was more deeply moved by the political changes in his own country,
by the national uprising in the Spanish peninsula, than Southey. While
seated at his desk, his intellect ranged through dim centuries of the
past. But his heart needed an abiding-place, and he yielded to the
bonds—strict and dear—of duty and of love which bound his own life to the
lives of others.

The ambitious quarto on which Cottle prided himself not a little was now
published (1796). To assign its true place to _Joan of Arc_, we must
remember that narrative poetry in the eighteenth century was of the
slenderest dimensions and the most modest temper. Poems of description
and sentiment seemed to leave no place for poems of action and passion.
Delicately finished cabinet pictures, like Shenstone’s _Schoolmistress_
and Goldsmith’s _Deserted Village_, had superseded fresco. The only
great English epic of that century is the prose Odyssey of which Mr.
Tom Jones is the hero. That estimable London merchant, Glover, had
indeed written an heroic poem containing the correct number of Books;
its subject was a lofty one; the sentiments were generous, the language
dignified; and inasmuch as Leonidas was a patriot and a Whig, true Whigs
and patriots bought and praised the poem. But Glover’s poetry lacks the
informing breath of life. His second poem, _The Athenaid_, appeared
after his death, and its thirty books fell plumb into the water of
oblivion. It looked as if the narrative poem _à longue haleine_ was dead
in English literature. Cowper had given breadth, with a mingled gaiety
and gravity, to the poetry of description and sentiment; Burns had made
the air tremulous with snatches of pure and thrilling song; the _Lyrical
Ballads_ were not yet. At this moment, from a provincial press, _Joan
of Arc_ was issued. As a piece of romantic narrative it belongs to the
new age of poetry; in sentiment it is revolutionary and republican; its
garment of style is of the eighteenth century. Nowhere, except it be in
the verses which hail “Inoculation, lovely Maid!” does the personified
abstraction, galvanized into life by printer’s type and poet’s epithet,
stalk more at large than in the unfortunate ninth book, the Vision of the
Maid, which William Taylor, of Norwich, pronounced worthy of Dante. The
critical reviews of the time were liberal in politics, and the poem was
praised and bought. “Brissot murdered” was good, and “the blameless wife
of Roland” atoned for some offences against taste; there was also that
notable reference to the “Almighty people” who “from their tyrant’s hand
dashed down the iron rod.” The delegated maid is a creature overflowing
with Rousseauish sensibility; virtue, innocence, the peaceful cot,
stand over against the wars and tyranny of kings, and the superstition
and cruelty of prelates. Southey himself soon disrelished the youthful
heats and violences of the poem; he valued it as the work which first
lifted him into public view; and, partly out of a kind of gratitude, he
rehandled the _Joan_ again and again. It would furnish an instructive
lesson to a young writer to note how its asperities were softened, its
spasm subdued, its swelling words abated. Yet its chief interest will
be perceived only by readers of the earlier text. To the second book
Coleridge contributed some four hundred lines, where Platonic philosophy
and protests against the Newtonian hypothesis of æther are not very
appropriately brought into connexion with the shepherd-girl of Domremi.
These lines disappeared from all editions after the first.[3]

The neighbourhood of Bristol was for the present Southey’s home. The
quickening of his blood by the beauty, the air and sun, of Southern
Europe, the sense of power imparted by his achievement in poetry, the
joy of reunion with his young wife, the joy, also, of solitude among
rocks and woods, combined to throw him into a vivid and creative mood.
His head was full of designs for tragedies, epics, novels, romances,
tales—among the rest, “My Oriental poem of The Destruction of the Dom
Daniel.” He has a “Helicon kind of dropsy” upon him; he had rather leave
off eating than poetizing. He was also engaged in making the promised
book of travel for Cottle; in what leisure time remained after these
employments he scribbled for _The Monthly Magazine_, and to good purpose,
for in eight months he had earned no less than “seven pounds and two pair
of breeches,” which, as he observes to his brother Tom, “is not amiss.”
He was resolved to be happy, and he was happy. Now, too, the foolish
estrangement on Coleridge’s part was brought to an end. Southey had
been making some acquaintance with German literature at second hand. He
had read Taylor’s rendering of Bürger’s _Lenore_, and wondered who this
William Taylor was; he had read Schiller’s _Cabal and Love_ in a wretched
translation, finding the fifth act dreadfully affecting; he had also read
Schiller’s _Fiesco_. Coleridge was just back after a visit to Birmingham,
but still held off from his brother-in-law and former friend. A sentence
from Schiller, copied on a slip of paper by Southey, with a word or
two of conciliation, was sent to the offended Abdiel of Pantisocracy:
“Fiesco! Fiesco! thou leavest a void in my bosom, which the human race,
thrice told, will never fill up.” It did not take much to melt the faint
resentment of Coleridge, and to open his liberal heart. An interview
followed, and in an hour’s time, as the story is told by Coleridge’s
nephew, “these two extraordinary youths were arm in arm again.”

Seven pounds and two pair of breeches are not amiss but pounds take
to themselves wings, and fly away: a poet’s wealth is commonly in the
_paulo-post-futurum_ tense; it therefore behoved Southey to proceed with
his intended study of the law. By Christmas he would receive the first
instalment of an annual allowance of 160_l._ promised by his generous
friend Wynn upon coming of age; but Southey, who had just written his
_Hymn to the Penates_—a poem of grave tenderness and sober beauty—knew
that those deities are exact in their demand for the dues of fire and
salt, for the firstlings of fruits, and for offerings of fine flour. A
hundred and sixty pounds would not appease them. To London, therefore,
he must go, and Blackstone must become his counsellor. But never did
Sindbad suffer from the tyrannous old man between his shoulders as Robert
Southey suffered from Blackstone. London in itself meant deprivation
of all that he most cared for; he loved to shape his life in large and
simple lines, and London seemed to scribble over his consciousness with
distractions and intricacies. “My spirits always sink when I approach it.
Green fields are my delight. I am not only better in health, but even in
heart, in the country.” Some of his father’s love of rural sights and
sounds was in him, though hare-hunting was not an amusement of Southey
the younger; he was as little of a sportsman as his friend Sir Thomas
More: the only murderous sport, indeed, which Southey ever engaged in
was that of pistol-shooting, with sand for ammunition, at the wasps in
Bedford’s garden, when he needed a diversion from the wars of Talbot and
the “missioned Maid.” Two pleasures of a rare kind London offered—the
presence of old friends, and the pursuit of old books upon the stalls.
But not even for these best lures proposed by the Demon of the place
would Southey renounce

“The genial influences
And thoughts and feelings to be found where’er
We breathe beneath the open sky, and see
Earth’s liberal bosom.”

To London, however, he would go, and would read nine hours a day at law.
Although he pleaded at times against his intended profession, Southey
really made a strenuous effort to overcome his repugnance to legal
studies, and for a while Blackstone and _Madoc_ seemed to advance side
by side. But the bent of his nature was strong. “I commit wilful murder
on my own intellect,” he writes, two years later, “by drudging at law.”
And the worst or the best of it was that all his drudgery was useless.
Southey’s memory was of that serviceable, sieve-like kind which regains
everything needful to its possessor, and drops everything which is mere
incumbrance. Every circumstance in the remotest degree connected with
the seminary of magicians in the Dom Daniel under the roots of the
sea adhered to his memory, but how to proceed in the Court of Common
Pleas was always just forgotten since yesterday. “I am not indolent; I
loathe indolence; but, indeed, reading law is laborious indolence—it is
thrashing straw.... I have given all possible attention, and attempted
to command volition; ... close the book and all was gone.” In 1801 there
was a chance of Southey’s visiting Sicily as secretary to some Italian
Legation. “It is unfortunate,” he writes to Bedford, “that you cannot
come to the sacrifice of one law-book—my whole proper stock—whom I design
to take up to the top of Mount Etna, for the express purpose of throwing
him straight to the devil. Huzza, Grosvenor! I was once afraid that I
should have a deadly deal of law to forget whenever I had done with it;
but my brains, God bless them, never received any, and I am as ignorant
as heart could wish. The tares would not grow.”

As spring advanced, impatience quickened within him; the craving for a
lonely place in sight of something green became too strong. Why might not
law be read in Hampshire under blue skies, and also poetry be written?
Southey longed to fill his eyesight with the sea, and with sunsets over
the sea; he longed to renew that delicious shock of plunging in salt
waves which he had last enjoyed in the Atlantic at the foot of the
glorious Arrabida mountain. Lodgings were found at Burton, near Christ
Church (1797); and here took place a little Southey family-gathering,
for his mother joined them, and his brother Tom, the midshipman, just
released from a French prison. Here, too, came Cottle, and there were
talks about the new volume of shorter poems. Here came Lloyd, the friend
of Coleridge, himself a writer of verse; and with Lloyd came Lamb,
the play of whose letters show that he found in Southey not only a
fellow-lover of quaint books, but also a ready smiler at quips and cranks
and twinklings of sly absurdity. And here he found John Rickman, “the
sturdiest of jovial companions,” whose clear head and stout heart were
at Southey’s service whenever they were needed through all the future
years.

When the holiday at Burton was at an end Southey had for a time no fixed
abode. He is now to be seen roaming over the cliffs by the Avon, and now
casting a glance across some book-stall near Gray’s Inn. In these and
subsequent visits to London he was wistful for home, and eager to hasten
back. “At last, my dear Edith, I sit down to write to you in quiet and
something like comfort.... My morning has been spent pleasantly, for it
has been spent alone in the library; the hours so employed pass rapidly
enough, but I grow more and more homesick, like a spoilt child. On the
29th you may expect me. Term opens on the 26th. After eating my third
dinner, I can drive to the mail, and thirteen shillings will be well
bestowed in bringing me home four-and-twenty hours earlier: it is not
above sixpence an hour, Edith, and I would gladly purchase an hour at
home now at a much higher price.”

A visit to Norwich (1798) was pleasant and useful, as widening the circle
of his literary friends. Here Southey obtained an introduction to William
Taylor, whose translations from the German had previously attracted his
notice. Norwich, at the end of the last century and the beginning of
the present, was a little Academe among provincial cities, where the
_belles-lettres_ and mutual admiration were assiduously cultivated.
Southey saw Norwich at its best. Among its “superior people” were several
who really deserved something better than that vague distinction. Chief
among them was Dr. Sayers, whom the German critics compared to Gray,
who had handled the Norse mythology in poetry, who created the English
monodrame, and introduced the rhymeless measures followed by Southey.
He rested too soon upon his well-earned reputation, contented himself
with touching and retouching his verses; and possessing singularly
pleasing manners, abounding information and genial wit, embellished
and enjoyed society.[4] William Taylor, the biographer of Sayers, was
a few years his junior. He was versed in Goethe, in Schiller, in the
great Kotzebue—Shakspeare’s immediate successor, in Klopstock, in
the fantastic ballad, in the new criticism, and all this at a time
when German characters were as undecipherable to most Englishmen as
Assyrian arrow-heads. The whirligig of time brought an odd revenge when
Carlyle, thirty years later, hailed in Taylor the first example of “the
natural-born English Philistine.” In Norwich he was known as a model
of filial virtue, a rising light of that illuminated city, a man whose
extraordinary range pointed him out as the fit and proper person to be
interrogated by any blue-stocking lady upon topics as remote as the
domestic arrangements of the Chinese Emperor, Chim-Cham-Chow. William
Taylor had a command of new and mysterious words: he shone in paradox,
and would make ladies aghast by “defences of suicide, avowals that snuff
alone had rescued him from it; information, given as certain, that ‘God
save the King’ was sung by Jeremiah in the Temple of Solomon;”[5] with
other blasphemies borrowed from the German, and too startling even for
rationalistic Norwich. Dr. Enfield, from whose _Speaker_ our fathers
learnt to recite “My name is Norval,” was no longer living; he had just
departed in the odour of dilettantism. But solemn Dr. Alderson was here,
and was now engaged in giving away his daughter Amelia to a divorced
bridegroom, the painter Opie. Just now Elizabeth Gurney was listening
in the Friends’ Meeting-House to that discourse which transformed her
from a gay haunter of country ball-rooms to the sister and servant
of Newgate prisoners. The Martineaus also were of Norwich, and upon
subsequent visits the author of _Thalaba_ and _Kehama_ was scrutinized
by the keen eyes of a little girl—not born at the date of his first
visit—who smiled somewhat too early and somewhat too maliciously at the
airs and affectations of her native town, and whose pleasure in pricking
a windbag, literary, political, or religious, was only over-exquisite.
But Harriet Martineau, who honoured courage, purity, faithfulness, and
strength wherever they were found, reverenced the Tory Churchman, Robert
Southey.[6]

Soon after his return from Norwich, a small house was taken at Westbury
(1797), a village two miles distant from Bristol. During twelve happy
months this continued to be Southey’s home. “I never before or since,”
he says in one of the prefaces to his collected poems, “produced so much
poetry in the same space of time.” William Taylor, by talks about Voss
and the German idylls, had set Southey thinking of a series of English
Eclogues; Taylor also expressed his wonder that some one of our poets
had not undertaken what the French and Germans so long supported—an
Almanack of the Muses, or Annual Anthology of minor poems by various
writers. The suggestion was well received by Southey, who became editor
of such annual volumes for the years 1799 and 1800. At this period were
produced many of the ballads and short pieces which are perhaps more
generally known than any other of Southey’s writings. He had served his
apprenticeship to the craft and mystery of such verse-making in the
_Morning Post_, earning thereby a guinea a week, but it was not until
_Bishop Bruno_ was written at Westbury that he had the luck to hit off
the right tone, as he conceived it, of the modern ballad. The popularity
of his _Mary the Maid of the Inn_, which unhappy children got by heart,
and which some one even dramatized, was an affliction to its author, for
he would rather have been remembered as a ballad writer in connexion with
_Rudiger_ and _Lord William_. What he has written in this kind certainly
does not move the heart as with a trumpet; it does not bring with it
the dim burden of sorrow which is laid upon the spirit by songs like
those of Yarrow crooning of “old, unhappy, far-off things.” But to tell
a tale of fantasy briefly, clearly, brightly, and at the same time with
a certain heightening of imaginative touches, is no common achievement.
The spectre of the murdered boy in _Lord William_ shone upon by a
sudden moonbeam, and surrounded by the welter of waves, is more than a
picturesque apparition; readers of good-will may find him a very genuine
little ghost, a stern and sad justicer. What has been named “the lyrical
cry” is hard to find in any of Southey’s shorter poems. In _Roderick_ and
elsewhere he takes delight in representing great moments of life when
fates are decided; but such moments are usually represented as eminences
on which will and passion wrestle in a mortal embrace, and if the cry
of passion be heard, it is often a half-stifled death cry. The best of
Southey’s shorter poems, expressing personal feelings, are those which
sum up the virtue spread over seasons of life and long habitual moods.
Sometimes he is simply sportive, as a serious man released from thought
and toil may be, and at such times the sportiveness, while genuine as a
schoolboy’s, is, like a schoolboy’s, the reverse of keen-edged; on other
occasions he expresses simply a strong man’s endurance of sorrow; but
more often an undertone of gravity appears through his glee, and in his
sorrow there is something of solemn joy.

All this year (1799) _Madoc_ was steadily advancing, and _The Destruction
of the Dom Daniel_ had been already sketched in outline. Southey was
fortunate in finding an admirable listener. The Pneumatic Institution,
established in Bristol by Dr. Beddoes, was now under the care of a youth
lately an apothecary’s apprentice at Penzance, a poet, but still more
a philosopher, “a miraculous young man.” “He is not yet twenty-one,
nor has he applied to chemistry more than eighteen months, but he has
advanced with such seven-leagued strides as to overtake everybody. His
name is Davy”—Humphry Davy—“the young chemist, the young everything,
the man least ostentatious, of first talent that I have ever known.”
Southey would walk across from Westbury, an easy walk over beautiful
ground, to breathe Davy’s wonder-working gas, “which excites all possible
mental and muscular energy, and induces almost a delirium of pleasurable
sensations without any subsequent dejection.” Pleased to find scientific
proof that he possessed a poet’s fine susceptibility, he records that
the nitrous oxide wrought upon him more readily than upon any other of
its votaries. “Oh, Tom!” he exclaims, gasping and ebullient—“oh, Tom!
such a gas has Davy discovered, the gaseous oxyde!... Davy has actually
invented a new pleasure for which language has no name. I am going for
more this evening; it makes one strong, and so happy! so gloriously
happy!... Oh, excellent air-bag!” If Southey drew inspiration from Davy’s
air-bag, could Davy do less than lend his ear to Southey’s epic? They
would stroll back to Martin Hall—so christened because the birds who
love delicate air built under its eaves their “pendant beds”—and in the
large sitting-room, its recesses stored with books, or seated near the
currant-bushes in the garden, the tenant of Martin Hall would read aloud
of Urien and Madoc and Cadwallon. When Davy had said good-bye, Southey
would sit long in the window open to the west, poring on the fading
glories of sunset, while about him the dew was cool, and the swallows’
tiny shrieks of glee grew less frequent, until all was hushed and another
day was done. And sometimes he would muse how all things that he needed
for utter happiness were here—all things—and then would rise an ardent
desire—except a child.

Martin Hall was unhappily held on no long lease; its owner now required
possession, and the Southeys, with their household gods, had reluctantly
to bid it farewell. Another trouble, and a more formidable one, at the
same time threatened. What with Annual Anthologies, Madoc in Wales, Madoc
in Aztlan, the design for a great poem on the Deluge, for a Greek drama,
for a Portuguese tragedy, for a martyrdom play of the reign of Queen
Mary—what with reading Spanish, learning Dutch, translating and reviewing
for the booksellers—Southey had been too closely at work. His heart began
to take fits of sudden and violent pulsation; his sleep, ordinarily as
sound as a child’s, became broken and unrefreshing. Unless the disease
were thrown off by regular exercise, Beddoes assured him, it would fasten
upon him, and could not be overcome. Two years previously they had spent
a summer at Burton, in Hampshire; why should they not go there again? In
June, 1799, unaccompanied by his wife, whose health seemed also to be
impaired, Southey went to seek a house. Two cottages, convertible into
one, with a garden, a fish-pond, and a pigeon-house, promised a term of
quiet and comfort in “Southey Palace that is to be.” Possession was
not to be had until Michaelmas, and part of the intervening time was
very enjoyably spent in roaming among the vales and woods, the coombes
and cliffs of Devon. It was in some measure a renewal of the open-air
delight which had been his at the Arrabida and Cintra. “I have seen the
Valley of Stones,” he writes: “Imagine a narrow vale between two ridges
of hills somewhat steep; the southern hill turfed; the vale which runs
from east to west covered with huge stones and fragments of stones among
the fern that fills it; the northern ridge completely bare, excoriated
of all turf and all soil, the very bones and skeleton of the earth; rock
reclining upon rock, stone piled upon stone, a huge and terrific mass. A
palace of the Preadamite kings, a city of the Anakim, must have appeared
so shapeless and yet so like the ruins of what had been shaped, after
the waters of the flood subsided. I ascended with some toil the highest
point; two large stones inclining on each other formed a rude portal on
the summit: here I sat down; a little level platform about two yards long
lay before me, and then the eye fell immediately upon the sea, far, very
far below. I never felt the sublimity of solitude before.”

But Southey could not rest. “I had rather leave off eating than
poetizing,” he had said; and now the words seemed coming true, for he
still poetized, and had almost ceased to eat. “Yesterday I finished
_Madoc_, thank God! and thoroughly to my own satisfaction; but I have
resolved on one great, laborious, and radical alteration. It was my
design to identify Madoc with Mango Capac, the legislator of Peru: in
this I have totally failed; therefore Mango Capac is to be the hero of
another poem.” There is something charming in the logic of Southey’s
“therefore;” so excellent an epic hero must not go to waste; but when,
on the following morning, he rose early, it was to put on paper the first
hundred lines, not of Mango Capac, but of the Dom Daniel poem which we
know as _Thalaba_. A _Mohammed_, to be written in hexameters, was also
on the stocks; and Coleridge had promised the half of this. Southey,
who remembered a certain quarto volume on Pantisocracy and other great
unwritten works, including the last—a Life of Lessing, by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge—knew the worth of his collaborateur’s promises. However, it
matters little; “the only inconvenience that his dereliction can occasion
will be that I shall write the poem in fragments, and have to seam them
together at last.” “My Mohammed will be what I believe the Arabian was in
the beginning of his career—sincere in enthusiasm; and it would puzzle
a casuist to distinguish between the belief of inspiration and actual
enthusiasm.” A short fragment of the _Mohammed_ was actually written by
Coleridge, and a short fragment by Southey, which, dating from 1799, have
an interest in connexion with the history of the English hexameter. Last
among these many projects, Southey has made up his mind to undertake one
great historical work—the History of Portugal. This was no dream-project;
Mango Capac never descended from his father the Sun to appear in
Southey’s poem; Mohammed never emerged from the cavern where the spider
had spread his net; but the work which was meant to rival Gibbon’s great
history was in part achieved. It is a fact more pathetic than many others
which make appeal for tears, that this most ambitious and most cherished
design of Southey’s life, conceived at the age of twenty-six, and kept
constantly in view through all his days of toil, was not yet half wrought
out when, forty years later, the pen dropped from his hand, and the
worn-out brain could think no more.

The deal shavings had hardly been cleared out of the twin cottages at
Burton, when Southey was prostrated by a nervous fever; on recovering,
he moved to Bristol, still weak, with strange pains about the heart, and
sudden seizures of the head. An entire change of scene was obviously
desirable. The sound of the brook that ran beside his uncle’s door at
Cintra, the scent of the lemon-groves, the grandeur of the Arrabida,
haunted his memory; there were books and manuscripts to be found in
Portugal which were essential in the preparation of his great history
of that country. Mr. Hill invited him; his good friend Elmsley, an old
schoolfellow, offered him a hundred pounds. From every point of view it
seemed right and prudent to go. Ailing and unsettled as he was, he yet
found strength and time to put his hand to a good work before leaving
Bristol. Chatterton always interested Southey deeply; they had this much
at least in common, that both had often listened to the chimes of St.
Mary Redcliffe, that both were lovers of antiquity, both were rich in
store of verse, and lacked all other riches. Chatterton’s sister, Mrs.
Newton, and her child were needy and neglected. It occurred to Southey
and Cottle that an edition of her brother’s poems might be published for
her benefit. Subscribers came in slowly, and the plan underwent some
alterations; but in the end the charitable thought bore fruit, and the
sister and niece of the great unhappy boy were lifted into security and
comfort. To have done something to appease the moody and indignant spirit
of a dead poet, was well; to have rescued from want a poor woman and her
daughter, was perhaps even better.

Early in April, 1800, Southey was once more on his way from Bristol,
by Falmouth, to the Continent, accompanied by his wife, now about to be
welcomed to Portugal by the fatherly uncle whose prudence she had once
alarmed. The wind was adverse, and while the travellers were detained
Southey strolled along the beach, caught soldier-crabs, and observed
those sea-anemones which blossom anew in the verse of Thalaba. For
reading on the voyage, he had brought Burns, Coleridge’s poems, the
Lyrical Ballads, and a poem, with “miraculous beauties,” called _Gebir_,
“written by God knows who.” But when the ship lost sight of England,
Southey, with swimming head, had little spirit left for wrestling with
the intractable thews of Landor’s early verse; he could just grunt out
some crooked pun or quaint phrase in answer to inquiries as to how he
did. Suddenly, on the fourth morning, came the announcement that a French
cutter was bearing down upon them. Southey leaped to his feet, hurriedly
removed his wife to a place of safety, and, musket in hand, took his
post upon the quarter-deck. The smoke from the enemy’s matches could be
seen. She was hailed, answered in broken English, and passed on. A moment
more, and the suspense was over; she was English, manned from Guernsey.
“You will easily imagine,” says Southey, “that my sensations at the
ending of the business were very definable—one honest, simple joy that
I was in a whole skin!” Two mornings more, and the sun rose behind the
Berlings; the heights of Cintra became visible, and nearer, the silver
dust of the breakers, with sea-gulls sporting over them; a pilot’s boat,
with puffed and flapping sail, ran out; they passed thankfully our Lady
of the Guide, and soon dropped anchor in the Tagus. An absence of four
years had freshened every object to Southey’s sense of seeing, and now he
had the joy of viewing all familiar things as strange through so dear a
companion’s eyes.

Mr. Hill was presently on board with kindly greeting; he had hired a
tiny house for them, perched well above the river, its little rooms cool
with many doors and windows. Manuel the barber, brisk as Figaro, would
be their factotum, and Mrs. Southey could also see a new maid—Maria
Rosa. Maria by-and-by came to be looked at, in powder, straw-coloured
gloves, fan, pink-ribands, muslin petticoat, green satin sleeves; she
was “not one of the folk who sleep on straw mattresses;” withal she was
young and clean. Mrs. Southey, who had liked little the prospect of
being thrown abroad upon the world, was beginning to be reconciled to
Portugal; roses and oranges and green peas in early May were pleasant
things. Then the streets were an unending spectacle; now a negro going
by with Christ in a glass case, to be kissed for a petty alms; now some
picturesque, venerable beggar; now the little Emperor of the Holy Ghost,
strutting it from Easter till Whitsuntide, a six-year-old mannikin with
silk stockings, buckles, cocked hat, and sword, his gentlemen ushers
attending, and his servants receiving donations on silver salvers. News
of an assassination, from time to time, did not much disturb the tranquil
tenor of ordinary life. There were old gardens to loiter in along
vine-trellised walks, or in sunshine where the grey lizards glanced and
gleamed. And eastward from the city were lovely by-lanes amid blossoming
olive-trees or market-gardens, veined by tiny aqueducts and musical with
the creak of water-wheels, which told of cool refreshment. There was also
the vast public aqueduct to visit; Edith Southey, holding her husband’s
hand, looked down, hardly discovering the diminished figures below of
women washing in the brook of Alcantara. If the sultry noon in Lisbon
was hard to endure, evening made amends; then strong sea-winds swept the
narrowest alley, and rolled their current down every avenue. And later,
it was pure content to look down upon the moonlighted river, with Almada
stretching its black isthmus into the waters that shone like midnight
snow.

Before moving to Cintra, they wished to witness the procession of the
Body of God—Southey likes the English words as exposing “the naked
nonsense of the blasphemy”—those of St. Anthony, and the Heart of Jesus,
and the first bull-fight. Everything had grown into one insufferable
glare; the very dust was bleached; the light was like the quivering of
a furnace fire. Every man and beast was asleep; the stone-cutter slept
with his head upon the stone; the dog slept under the very cart-wheels;
the bells alone slept not, nor ceased from their importunate clamour.
At length—it was near mid-June—a marvellous cleaning of streets took
place, the houses were hung with crimson damask, soldiers came and lined
the ways, windows and balconies filled with impatient watchers—not a
jewel in Lisbon but was on show. With blare of music the procession
began; first, the banners of the city and its trades, the clumsy bearers
crab-sidling along; an armed champion carrying a flag; wooden St. George
held painfully on horseback; led horses, their saddles covered with rich
escutcheons; all the brotherhoods, an immense train of men in red or grey
cloaks; the knights of the orders superbly dressed; the whole patriarchal
church in glorious robes; and then, amid a shower of rose-leaves
fluttering from the windows, the Pix, and after the Pix, the Prince. On a
broiling Sunday, the amusement being cool and devout, was celebrated the
bull-feast. The first wound sickened Edith; Southey himself, not without
an effort, looked on and saw “the death-sweat darkening the dun hide”—a
circumstance borne in mind for his _Thalaba_. “I am not quite sure,” he
writes, “that my curiosity in once going was perfectly justifiable, but
the pain inflicted by the sight was expiation enough.”

After this it was high time to take refuge from the sun among the
lemon-groves at Cintra. Here, if ever in his life, Southey for a brief
season believed that the grasshopper is wiser than the ant; a true
Portuguese indolence overpowered him. “I have spent my mornings half
naked in a wet room dozing upon the bed, my right hand not daring to
touch my left.” Such glorious indolence could only be a brief possession
with Southey. More often he would wander by the streams to those spots
where purple crocuses carpeted the ground, and there rest and read.
Sometimes seated sideways on one of the sure-footed _burros_, with a boy
to beat and guide the brute, he would jog lazily on, while Edith, now
skilled in “ass-womanship,” would jog along on a brother donkey. Once and
again a fog—not unwelcome—came rolling in from the ocean, one huge mass
of mist, marching through the valley like a victorious army, approaching,
blotting the brightness, but leaving all dank and fresh. And always the
evenings were delightful, when fireflies sparkled under the trees, or in
July and August, as their light went out, when the grillo began his song.
“I eat oranges, figs, and delicious pears—drink Colares wine, a sort of
half-way excellence between port and claret—read all I can lay my hands
on—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
that tomorrow was not to be provided for.”

But Southey’s second visit to Portugal was, on the whole, no season of
repose. A week in the southern climate seemed to have restored him to
health, and he assailed folio after folio in his uncle’s library, rising
each morning at five, “to lay in bricks for the great Pyramid of my
history.” The chronicles, the laws, the poetry of Portugal, were among
these bricks. Nor did he slacken in his ardour as a writer of verse. Six
books of _Thalaba_ were in his trunk in manuscript when he sailed from
Falmouth; the remaining six were of a southern birth. “I am busy,” he
says, “in correcting _Thalaba_ for the press.... It is a good job done,
and so I have thought of another, and another, and another.” As with
_Joan of Arc_, so with this maturer poem the correction was a rehandling
which doubled the writer’s work. To draw the pen across six hundred lines
did not cost him a pang. At length the manuscript was despatched to his
friend Rickman, with instructions to make as good a bargain as he could
for the first thousand copies. By _Joan_ and the miscellaneous _Poems_
of 1797, Southey had gained not far from a hundred and fifty pounds; he
might fairly expect a hundred guineas for _Thalaba_. It would buy the
furniture of his long-expected house. But he was concerned about the
prospects of Harry, his younger brother; and now William Taylor wrote
that some provincial surgeon of eminence would board and instruct the lad
during four or five years for precisely a hundred guineas. “A hundred
guineas!” Southey exclaims; “well, but, thank God, there is _Thalaba_
ready, for which I ask this sum.” “_Thalaba_ finished, all my poetry,”
he writes, “instead of being wasted in rivulets and ditches, shall flow
into the great Madoc Mississippi river.” One epic poem, however, he
finds too little to content him; already _The Curse of Kehama_ is in
his head, and another of the mythological series which never saw the
light. “I have some distant view of manufacturing a Hindoo romance,
wild as _Thalaba_; and a nearer one of a Persian story, of which I
see the germ of vitality. I take the system of the Zendavesta for my
mythology, and introduce the powers of darkness persecuting a Persian,
one of the hundred and fifty sons of the great king; an Athenian captive
is a prominent character, and the whole warfare of the evil power ends
in exalting a Persian prince into a citizen of Athens.” From which
catastrophe we may infer that Southey had still something republican
about his heart.

Before quitting Portugal, the Southeys, with their friend Waterhouse and
a party of ladies, travelled northwards, encountering very gallantly
the trials of the way; Mafra, its convent and library, had been
already visited by Southey. “Do you love reading?” asked the friar
who accompanied them, overhearing some remark about the books. “Yes.”
“And I,” said the honest Franciscan, “love eating and drinking.” At
Coimbra—that central point from which radiates the history and literature
of Portugal—Southey would have agreed feelingly with the good brother of
the Mafra convent; he had looked forward to precious moments of emotion
in that venerable city; but air and exercise had given him a cruel
appetite; if truth must be told, the ducks of the monastic poultry-yard
were more to him than the precious finger of St. Anthony. “I _did_ long,”
he confesses, “to buy, beg, or steal a dinner.” The dinner must somehow
have been secured before he could approach in a worthy spirit that most
affecting monument at Coimbra—the Fountain of Tears. “It is the spot
where Inez de Castro was accustomed to meet her husband Pedro, and weep
for him in his absence. Certainly her dwelling-house was in the adjoining
garden; and from there she was dragged, to be murdered at the feet of the
king, her father-in-law.... I, who have long planned a tragedy upon the
subject, stood upon my own scene.” While Southey and his companions gazed
at the fountains and their shadowing cedar-trees, the gownsmen gathered
round; the visitors were travel-stained and bronzed by the sun; perhaps
the witty youths cheered for the lady with the squaw tint; whatever
offence may have been given, the ladies’ protectors found them “impudent
blackguards,” and with difficulty suppressed pugilistic risings.

After an excursion southwards to Algarve, Southey made ready for his
return to England (1801). His wife desired it, and he had attained the
main objects of his sojourn abroad. His health had never been more
perfect; he had read widely; he had gathered large material for his
History; he knew where to put his hand on this or that which might
prove needful, whenever he should return to complete his work among the
libraries of Portugal. On arriving at Bristol, a letter from Coleridge
met him. It was dated from Greta Hall, Keswick; and after reminding
Southey that Bristol had recently lost the miraculous young man, Davy,
and adding that he, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had experiences, sufferings,
hopes, projects to impart, which would beguile much time, “were you on a
desert island and I your _Friday_,” it went on to present the attractions
of Keswick, and in particular of Greta Hall, in a way which could not be
resisted. Taking all in all—the beauty of the prospect, the roominess
of the house, the lowness of the rent, the unparalleled merits of the
landlord, the neighbourhood of noble libraries—it united advantages not
to be found together elsewhere. “In short”—the appeal wound up—“for
situation and convenience—and when I mention the name of Wordsworth, for
society of men of intellect—I know no place in which you and Edith would
find yourselves so well suited.”

Meanwhile Drummond, an M.P. and a translator of Persius, who was going
as ambassador, first to Palermo and then to Constantinople, was on the
look-out for a secretary. The post would be obtained for Southey by his
friend Wynn, if possible; this might lead to a consulship; why not to the
consulship at Lisbon, with 1000_l._ a year? Such possibilities, however,
could not prevent him from speedily visiting Coleridge and Keswick.
“Time and absence make strange work with our affections,” so writes
Southey; “but mine are ever returning to rest upon you. I have other and
dear friends, but none with whom the whole of my being is intimate....
Oh! I have yet such dreams. Is it quite clear that you and I were not
meant for some better star, and dropped by mistake into this world of
pounds, shillings, and pence?” So for the first time Southey set foot in
Keswick, and looked upon the lake and the hills which were to become a
portion of his being, and which have taken him so closely, so tenderly,
to themselves. His first feeling was one not precisely of disappointment,
but certainly of remoteness from this northern landscape; he had not
yet come out from the glow and the noble _abandon_ of the South. “These
lakes,” he says, “are like rivers; but oh for the Mondego and the Tagus!
And these mountains, beautifully indeed are they shaped and grouped; but
oh for the grand Monchique! and for Cintra, my paradise!”

Time alone was needed to calm and temper his sense of seeing; for
when, leaving Mrs. Southey with her sister and Coleridge, he visited
his friend Wynn at Llangedwin, and breathed the mountain air of his
own Prince Madoc, all the loveliness of Welsh streams and rivers sank
into his soul. “The Dee is broad and shallow, and its dark waters
shiver into white and silver and hues of amber brown. No mud upon the
shore—no bushes—no marsh plants—anywhere a child might stand dry-footed
and dip his hand into the water.” And again a contrasted picture: “The
mountain-side was stony, and a few trees grew among its stones; the other
side was more wooded, and had grass on the top, and a huge waterfall
thundered into the bottom, and thundered down the bottom. When it had
nearly passed these rocky straits, it met another stream. The width of
water then became considerable, and twice it formed a large black pool,
to the eye absolutely stagnant, the froth of the waters that entered
there sleeping upon the surface; it had the deadness of enchantment; yet
was not the pool wider than the river above it and below it, where it
foamed over and fell.” Such free delight as Southey had among the hills
of Wales came quickly to an end. A letter was received offering him the
position of private secretary to Mr. Corry, Chancellor of the Exchequer
for Ireland, with a salary of four hundred pounds a year. Rickman was
in Dublin, and this was Rickman’s doing. Southey, as he was in prudence
bound to do, accepted the appointment, hastened back to Keswick, bade
farewell for a little while to his wife, and started for Dublin in no
cheerful frame of mind.

At a later time, Southey possessed Irish friends whom he honoured and
loved; he has written wise and humane words about the Irish people. But
all through his career Ireland was to Southey somewhat too much that
ideal country—of late to be found only in the region of humorous-pathetic
melodrama—in which the business of life is carried on mainly by the
agency of bulls and blunder-busses; and it required a distinct effort
on his part to conceive the average Teague or Patrick otherwise than
as a potato-devouring troglodyte, on occasions grotesquely amiable,
but more often with the rage of Popery working in his misproportioned
features. Those hours during which Southey waited for the packet were
among the heaviest of his existence. After weary tackings in a baffling
wind, the ship was caught into a gale, and was whirled away, fifteen
miles north of Dublin, to the fishing-town of Balbriggan. Then, a drive
across desolate country, which would have depressed the spirits had it
not been enlivened by the airs and humours of little Dr. Solomon, the
unique, the omniscient, the garrulous, next after Bonaparte the most
illustrious of mortals, inventor of the Cordial Balm of Gilead, and
possessor of a hundred puncheons of rum. When the new private secretary
arrived, the chancellor was absent; the secretary, therefore, set
to work on rebuilding a portion of his _Madoc_. Presently Mr. Corry
appeared, and there was a bow and a shake of hands; then he hurried away
to London, to be followed by Southey, who, going round by Keswick, was
there joined by his wife. From London Southey writes to Rickman, “The
chancellor and the scribe go on in the same way. The scribe hath made
out a catalogue of all books published since the commencement of ’97
upon finance and scarcity; he hath also copied a paper written by J.R.
[John Rickman] containing some Irish alderman’s hints about oak-bark;
and nothing more hath the scribe done in his vocation. Duly he calls at
the chancellor’s door; sometimes he is admitted to immediate audience;
sometimes kicketh his heels in the antechamber; ... sometimes a gracious
message emancipates him for the day. Secrecy hath been enjoined him as to
these State proceedings. On three subjects he is directed to read and
research—corn-laws, finance, tythes, according to their written order.”
The independent journals meanwhile had compared Corry and Southey, the
two State conspirators, to Empson and Dudley; and delicately expressed a
hope that the poet would make no false _numbers_ in his new work.

Southey, who had already worn an ass’s head in one of Gillray’s
caricatures, was not afflicted by the newspaper sarcasm; but the vacuity
of such a life was intolerable; and when it was proposed that he should
become tutor to Corry’s son, he brought his mind finally to the point of
resigning “a foolish office and a good salary.” His notions of competence
were moderate; the vagabondage between the Irish and English headquarters
entailed by his office was irksome. His books were accumulating, and
there was ample work to be done among them if he had but a quiet library
of his own. Then, too, there was another good reason for resigning. A new
future was opening for Southey. Early in the year (1802) his mother died.
She had come to London to be with her son; there she had been stricken
with mortal illness; true to her happy, self-forgetful instincts, she
remained calm, uncomplaining, considerate for others. “Go down, my dear;
I shall sleep presently,” she had said, knowing that death was at hand.
With his mother, the last friend of Southey’s infancy and childhood was
gone. “I calmed and curbed myself,” he writes, “and forced myself to
employment; but at night there was no sound of feet in her bedroom, to
which I had been used to listen, and in the morning it was not my first
business to see her.” The past was past indeed. But as the year opened,
it brought a happy promise; before summer would end, a child might be in
his arms. Here were sufficient reasons for his resignation; a library and
a nursery ought, he says, to be stationary.

To Bristol husband and wife came, and there found a small furnished
house. After the roar of Fleet Street, and the gathering of distinguished
men—Fuseli, Flaxman, Barry, Lamb, Campbell, Bowles—there was a
strangeness in the great quiet of the place. But in that quiet Southey
could observe each day the growth of the pile of manuscript containing
his version of _Amadis of Gaul_, for which Longman and Rees promised
him a munificent sixty pounds. He toiled at his _History of Portugal_,
finding matter of special interest in that part which was concerned with
the religious orders. He received from his Lisbon collection precious
boxes folio-crammed. “My dear and noble books! Such folios of saints!
dull books enough for my patience to diet upon, till all my flock be
gathered together into one fold.” Sixteen volumes of Spanish poetry are
lying uncut in the next room; a folio yet untasted jogs his elbow; two
of the best and rarest chronicles coyly invite him. He had books enough
in England to employ three years of active industry. And underlying all
thoughts of the great Constable Nuño Alvares Pereyra, of the King D.
Joaõ I., and of the Cid, deeper than the sportsman pleasure of hunting
from their lair strange facts about the orders Cistercian, Franciscan,
Dominican, Jesuit, there was a thought of that new-comer whom, says
Southey, “I already feel disposed to call whelp and dog, and all those
vocables of vituperation by which a man loves to call those he loves
best.”

In September, 1802, was born Southey’s first child, named Margaret
Edith, after her mother and her dead grandmother; a flat-nosed,
round-foreheaded, grey-eyed, good-humoured girl. “I call Margaret,”
he says, in a sober mood of fatherly happiness, “by way of avoiding
all commonplace phraseology of endearment, a worthy child and a most
excellent character. She loves me better than any one except her mother;
her eyes are as quick as thought; she is all life and spirit, and as
happy as the day is long; but that little brain of hers is never at rest,
and it is painful to see how dreams disturb her.” For Margery and her
mother and the folios a habitation must be found. Southey inclined now
towards settling in the neighbourhood of London—now towards Norwich,
where Dr. Sayers and William Taylor would welcome him—now towards
Keswick; but its horrid latitude, its incessant rains! On the whole, his
heart turned most fondly to Wales; and there, in one of the loveliest
spots of Great Britain, in the Vale of Neath, was a house to let, by name
Maes Gwyn. Southey gave his fancy the rein, and pictured himself “housed
and homed” in Maes Gwyn, working steadily at the _History of Portugal_,
and now and again glancing away from his work to have a look at Margery
seated in her little great chair. But it was never to be; a difference
with the landlord brought to an end his treaty for the house, and in
August the child lay dying. It was bitter to part with what had been so
long desired—during seven childless years—and what had grown so dear.
But Southey’s heart was strong; he drew himself together, returned to
his toil, now less joyous than before, and set himself to strengthen and
console his wife.

Bristol was henceforth a place of mournful memories. “Edith,” writes
Southey, “will be nowhere so well as with her sister Coleridge. She has
a little girl some six months old, and I shall try and graft her into
the wound while it is yet fresh.” Thus Greta Hall received its guests
(September, 1803). At first the sight of little Sara Coleridge and her
baby cooings caused shootings of pain on which Southey had not counted.
Was the experiment of this removal to prove a failure? He still felt
as if he were a feather driven by the wind. “I have no symptoms of
root-striking here,” he said. But he spoke, not knowing what was before
him; the years of wandering were indeed over; here he had found his home.

CHAPTER IV.

WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803-1839.

The best of life with Southey was yet to come; but in what remains there
are few outstanding events to chronicle; there is nowhere any splendour
of circumstance. Of some lives the virtue is distilled, as it were, into
a few exquisite moments—moments of rapture, of vision, of sudden and
shining achievement; all the days and years seem to exist only for the
sake of such faultless moments, and it matters little whether such a
life, of whose very essence it is to break the bounds of time and space,
be long or short as measured by the falling of sandgrains or the creeping
of a shadow. Southey’s life was not one of these; its excellence was
constant, uniform, perhaps somewhat too evenly distributed. He wrought in
his place day after day, season after season. He submitted to the good
laws of use and wont. He grew stronger, calmer, more full-fraught with
stores of knowledge, richer in treasure of the heart. Time laid its hand
upon him gently and unfalteringly: the bounding step became less light
and swift; the ringing voice lapsed into sadder fits of silence; the
raven hair changed to a snowy white; only still the indefatigable eye ran
down the long folio columns, and the indefatigable hand still held the
pen—until all true life had ceased. When it has been said that Southey
was appointed Pye’s successor in the laureateship, that he received an
honorary degree from his university, that now and again he visited the
Continent, that children were born to him from among whom death made
choice of the dearest; and then we add that he wrote and published books,
the leading facts of Southey’s life have been told. Had he been worse
or a weaker man, we might look to find mysteries, picturesque vices,
or engaging follies; as it is, everything is plain, straightforward,
substantial. What makes the life of Southey eminent and singular is
its unity of purpose, its persistent devotion to a chosen object, its
simplicity, purity, loyalty, fortitude, kindliness, truth.

The river Greta, before passing under the bridge at the end of Main
Street, Keswick, winds about the little hill on which stands Greta Hall;
its murmur may be heard when all is still beyond the garden and orchard;
to the west it catches the evening light. “In front,” Coleridge wrote
when first inviting his friend to settle with him, “we have a giants’
camp—an encamped army of tent-like mountains, which by an inverted arch
gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely vale and the
wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left Derwentwater and
Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of Borrowdale. Behind us
the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two chasms and a tent-like
ridge in the larger.” Southey’s house belongs in a peculiar degree to
his life: in it were stored the treasures upon which his intellect drew
for sustenance; in it his affections found their earthly abiding-place;
all the most mirthful, all the most mournful, recollections of Southey
hang about it; to it in every little wandering his heart reverted like
an exile’s; it was at once his workshop and his playground; and for a
time, while he endured a living death, it became his antechamber to the
tomb. The rambling tenement consisted of two houses under one roof, the
larger part being occupied by the Coleridges and Southeys, the smaller
for a time by Mr. Jackson, their landlord. On the ground-floor was the
parlour which served as dining-room and general sitting-room, a pleasant
chamber looking upon the green in front; here also were Aunt Lovell’s
sitting-room, and the mangling-room, in which stood ranged in a row the
long array of clogs, from the greatest even unto the least, figuring in a
symbol the various stages of human life. The stairs to the right of the
kitchen led to a landing-place filled with bookcases; a few steps more
led to the little bedroom occupied by Mrs. Coleridge and her daughter.
“A few steps farther,” writes Sara Coleridge, whose description is here
given in abridgment, “was a little wing bedroom—then the study, where
my uncle sat all day occupied with literary labours and researches, but
which was used as a drawing-room for company. Here all the tea-visiting
guests were received. The room had three windows, a large one looking
down upon the green with the wide flower-border, and over to Keswick Lake
and mountains beyond. There were two smaller windows looking towards
the lower part of the town seen beyond the nursery-garden. The room was
lined with books in fine bindings; there were books also in brackets,
elegantly lettered vellum-covered volumes lying on their sides in a heap.
The walls were hung with pictures, mostly portraits.... At the back of
the room was a comfortable sofa, and there were sundry tables, beside
my uncle’s library table, his screen, desk, etc. Altogether, with its
internal fittings up, its noble outlook, and something pleasing in its
proportions, this was a charming room.” Hard by the study was Southey’s
bedroom. We need not ramble farther through passages lined with books,
and up and down flights of stairs to Mr. Jackson’s organ-room, and Mrs.
Lovell’s room, and Hartley’s parlour, and the nurseries, and one dark
apple-room supposed to be the abode of a bogle. Without, greensward,
flowers, shrubs, strawberry-beds, fruit-trees, encircled the house;
to the back, beyond the orchard, a little wood stretched down to the
river-side. A rough path ran along the bottom of the wood; here, on a
covered seat, Southey often read or planned future work, and here his
little niece loved to play in sight of the dimpling water. “Dear Greta
Hall!” she exclaims; “and oh, that rough path beside the Greta! How much
of my childhood, of my girlhood, of my youth, were spent there!”

Southey’s attachment to his mountain town and its lakes was of no sudden
growth. He came to them as one not born under their influence; that
power of hills to which Wordsworth owed fealty, had not brooded upon
Southey during boyhood; the rich southern meadows, the wooded cliffs of
Avon, the breezy downs, had nurtured his imagination, and to these he
was still bound by pieties of the heart. In the churchyard at Ashton,
where lay his father and his kinsfolk, the beneficent cloud of mingled
love and sorrow most overshadowed his spirit. His imagination did not
soar, as did Wordsworth’s, in naked solitudes; he did not commune with
a Presence immanent in external nature: the world, as he viewed it, was
an admirable habitation for mankind—a habitation with a history. Even
after he had grown a mountaineer, he loved a humanized landscape, one
in which the gains of man’s courage, toil, and endurance are apparent.
Flanders, where the spade has wrought its miracles of diligence, where
the slow canal-boat glides, where the _carillons_ ripple from old spires,
where sturdy burghers fought for freedom, and where vellum-bound quartos
might be sought and found, Flanders, on the whole gave Southey deeper
and stronger feelings than did Switzerland. The ideal land of his dreams
was always Spain: the earthly paradise for him was Cintra, with its
glory of sun, and a glow even in its depths of shadow. But as the years
went by, Spain became more and more a memory, less and less a hope; and
the realities of life in his home were of more worth every day. When,
in 1807, it grew clear that Greta Hall was to be his life-long place of
abode, Southey’s heart closed upon it with a tenacious grasp. He set
the plasterer and carpenter to work; he planted shrubs; he enclosed the
garden; he gathered his books about him, and thought that here were
materials for the industry of many years; he held in his arms children
who were born in this new home; and he looked to Crosthwaite Churchyard,
expecting, with quiet satisfaction, that when toil was ended he should
there take his rest.

“I don’t talk much about these things,” Southey writes; “but these lakes
and mountains give me a deep joy for which I suspect nothing elsewhere
can compensate, and this is a feeling which time strengthens instead
of weakening.” Some of the delights of southern counties he missed;
his earliest and deepest recollections were connected with flowers;
both flowers and fruits were now too few; there was not a cowslip to
be found near Keswick. “Here in Cumberland I miss the nightingale and
the violet—the most delightful bird and the sweetest flower.” But for
such losses there were compensations. A pastoral land will give amiable
pledges for the seasons and the months, and will perform its engagements
with a punctual observance; to this the mountains hardly condescend, but
they shower at their will a sudden largess of unimagined beauty. Southey
would sally out for a constitutional at his three-mile pace, the peaked
cap slightly shadowing his eyes, which were coursing over the pages of a
book held open as he walked; he had left his study to obtain exercise,
and so to preserve health; he was not a laker engaged in view-hunting;
he did not affect the contemplative mood which at the time was not and
could not be his. But when he raised his eyes, or when, quickening his
three-mile to a four-mile pace, he closed the book, the beauty which lay
around him liberated and soothed his spirit. This it did unfailingly;
and it might do more, for incalculable splendours, visionary glories,
exaltations, terrors, are momentarily possible where mountain, and
cloud, and wind, and sunshine meet. Southey, as he says, did not talk
much of these things, but they made life for him immeasurably better
than it would have been in city confinement; there were spaces, vistas,
an atmosphere around his sphere of work, which lightened and relieved
it. The engagements in his study were always so numerous and so full of
interest that it needed an effort to leave the table piled with books and
papers. But a May morning would draw him forth into the sun in spite of
himself. Once abroad, Southey had a vigorous joy in the quickened blood,
and the muscles impatient with energy long pent up. The streams were his
especial delight; he never tired of their deep retirement, their shy
loveliness, and their melody; they could often beguile him into an hour
of idle meditation; their beauty has in an especial degree passed into
his verse. When his sailor brother Thomas came and settled in the Vale
of Newlands, Southey would quickly cover the ground from Keswick at his
four-mile pace, and in the beck at the bottom of Tom’s fields, on summer
days, he would plunge and re-plunge and act the river-god in the natural
seats of mossy stone. Or he would be overpowered some autumn morning by
the clamour of childish voices voting a holiday by acclamation. Their
father must accompany them; it would do him good, they knew it would;
they knew he did not take sufficient exercise, for they had heard him
say so. Where should the scramble be? To Skiddaw Dod, or Causey Pike, or
Watenlath, or, as a compromise between their exuberant activity and his
inclination for the chair and the fireside, to Walla Crag? And there,
while his young companions opened their baskets and took their noonday
meal, Southey would seat himself—as Westall has drawn him—upon the
bough of an ash-tree, the water flowing smooth and green at his feet,
but a little higher up broken, flashing, and whitening in its fall; and
there in the still autumn noon he would muse happily, placidly, not now
remembering with overkeen desire the gurgling tanks and fountains of
Cintra, his Paradise of early manhood.[7]

On summer days, when the visits of friends, or strangers bearing letters
of introduction, compelled him to idleness, Southey’s more ambitious
excursions were taken. But he was well aware that those who form
acquaintance with a mountain region during a summer all blue and gold,
know little of its finer power. It is October that brings most often
those days faultless, pearl-pure, of affecting influence,

“In the long year set
Like captain jewels in the carcanet.”

Then, as Wordsworth has said, the atmosphere seems refined, and the sky
rendered more crystalline, as the vivifying heat of the year abates;
the lights and shadows are more delicate; the colouring is richer and
more finely harmonized; and, in this season of stillness, the ear being
unoccupied, or only gently excited, the sense of vision becomes more
susceptible of its appropriate enjoyments. Even December is a better
month than July for perceiving the special greatness of a mountainous
country. When the snow lies on the fells soft and smooth, Grisedale Pike
and Skiddaw drink in tints at morning and evening marvellous as those
seen upon Mont Blanc or the Jungfrau for purity and richness.

“Summer,” writes Southey, “is not the season for this country. Coleridge
says, and says well, that then it is like a theatre at noon. There are
no _goings on_ under a clear sky; but at other seasons there is such
shifting of shades, such islands of light, such columns and buttresses
of sunshine, as might almost make a painter burn his brushes, as the
sorcerers did their books of magic when they saw the divinity which
rested upon the apostles. The very snow, which you would perhaps think
must monotonize the mountains, gives new varieties; it brings out their
recesses and designates all their inequalities; it impresses a better
feeling of their height; and it reflects such tints of saffron, or fawn,
or rose-colour to the evening sun. _O Maria Santissima!_ Mount Horeb,
with the glory upon its summit, might have been more glorious, but not
more beautiful than old Skiddaw in his winter pelisse. I will not quarrel
with frost, though the fellow has the impudence to take me by the nose.
The lake-side has such ten thousand charms: a fleece of snow or of the
hoar-frost lies on the fallen trees or large stones; the grass-points,
that just peer above the water, are powdered with diamonds; the ice on
the margin with chains of crystal, and such veins and wavy lines of
beauty as mock all art; and, to crown all, Coleridge and I have found out
that stones thrown upon the lake when frozen make a noise like singing
birds, and when you whirl on it a large flake of ice, away the shivers
slide, chirping and warbling like a flight of finches.” This tells of
a February at Keswick; the following describes the _goings on_ under
an autumn sky:—“The mountains on Thursday evening, before the sun was
quite down or the moon bright, were all of one dead-blue colour; their
rifts and rocks and swells and scars had all disappeared—the surface
was perfectly uniform, nothing but the outline distinct; and this even
surface of dead blue, from its unnatural uniformity, made them, though
not transparent, appear transvious—as though they were of some soft or
cloudy texture through which you could have passed. I never saw any
appearance so perfectly unreal. Sometimes a blazing sunset seems to steep
them through and through with red light; or it is a cloudy morning, and
the sunshine slants down through a rift in the clouds, and the pillar of
light makes the spot whereon it falls so emerald green, that it looks
like a little field of Paradise. At night you lose the mountains, and the
wind so stirs up the lake that it looks like the sea by moonlight.”

If Southey had not a companion by his side, the solitude of his ramble
was unbroken; he never had the knack of forgathering with chance
acquaintance. With intellectual and moral boldness, and with high
spirits, he united a constitutional bashfulness and reserve. His retired
life, his habits of constant study, and, in later years, his shortness of
sight, fell in with this infirmity. He would not patronize his humbler
neighbours; he had a kind of imaginative jealousy on behalf of their
rights as independent persons; and he could not be sure of straightway
discovering, by any genius or instinct of good-fellowship, that common
ground whereon strangers are at home with one another. Hence—and Southey
himself wished that it had been otherwise—long as he resided at Keswick,
there were perhaps not twenty persons of the lower ranks whom he knew
by sight. “After slightly returning the salutation of some passer-by,”
says his son, “he would again mechanically lift his cap as he heard some
well-known name in reply to his inquiries, and look back with regret that
the greeting had not been more cordial.”

If the ice were fairly broken, he found it natural to be easy and
familiar, and by those whom he employed he was regarded with affectionate
reverence. Mrs. Wilson—kind and generous creature—remained in Greta
Hall tending the children as they grew up, until she died, grieved
for by the whole household. Joseph Glover, who created the scarecrow
“Statues” for the garden—male and female created he them, as the reader
may see them figured toward the close of _The Doctor_—Glover, the artist
who set up Edith’s fantastic chimney-piece (“Well, Miss Southey,”
cried honest Joseph, “I’ve done my Devils”), was employed by Southey
during five-and-twenty years, ever since he was a ’prentice-boy. If
any warm-hearted neighbour, known or unknown to him, came forward with
a demand on Southey’s sympathies, he was sure to meet a neighbourly
response. When the miller, who had never spoken to him before, invited
the laureate to rejoice with him over the pig he had killed—the finest
ever fattened—and when Southey was led to the place where that which had
ceased to be pig and was not yet bacon, was hung up by the hind feet, he
filled up the measure of the good man’s joy by hearty appreciation of a
porker’s points. But Cumberland enthusiasm seldom flames abroad with so
prodigal a blaze as that of the worthy miller’s heart.

Within the charmed circle of home, Southey’s temper and manners were
full of a strong and sweet hilarity; and the home circle was in itself a
considerable group of persons. The Pantisocratic scheme of a community
was, after all, near finding a fulfilment, only that the Greta ran by in
place of the Susquehanna, and that Southey took upon his own shoulders
the work of the dead Lovell, and of Coleridge, who lay in weakness
and dejection, whelmed under the tide of dreams. For some little time
Coleridge continued to reside at Keswick, an admirable companion in
almost all moods of mind, for all kinds of wisdom, and all kinds of
nonsense. When he was driven abroad in search of health, it seemed as if
a brightness were gone out of the air, and the horizon of life had grown
definite and contracted. “It is now almost ten years,” Southey writes,
“since he and I first met in my rooms at Oxford, which meeting decided
the destiny of both.... I am perpetually pained at thinking what he ought
to be, ... but the tidings of his death would come upon me more like a
stroke of lightning than any evil I have ever yet endured.”

Mrs. Coleridge, with her children, remained at Greta Hall. That quaint
little metaphysician, Hartley—now answering to the name of Moses, now to
that of Job, the oddest of all God’s creatures—was an unceasing wonder
and delight to his uncle: “a strange, strange boy, ‘exquisitely wild,’ an
utter visionary, like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle
of his own making. He alone is a light of his own. Of all human beings
I never saw one so utterly naked of self.” When his father expressed
surprise that Hartley should take his pleasure of wheel-barrow-riding so
sadly, “The pity is”—explained little Job—“the pity is, _I’se_ always
thinking of my thoughts.” “‘I’m a boy of a very religious turn,’ he says;
for he always talks of himself and examines his own character, just as
if he were speaking of another person, and as impartially. Every night
he makes an extempore prayer aloud; but it is always in bed, and not
till he is comfortable there and got into the mood. When he is ready, he
touches Mrs. Wilson, who sleeps with him, and says, ‘Now listen!’ and off
he sets like a preacher.” Younger than Hartley was Derwent Coleridge, a
fair, broad-chested boy, with merry eye and roguish lips, now grown out
of that yellow frock in which he had earned his name of Stumpy Canary.
Sara Coleridge, when her uncle came to Keswick after the death of his own
Margery, was a little grand-lama at that worshipful age of seven months.
A fall into the Greta, a year and a half later, helped to change her to
the delicate creature whose large blue eyes would look up timidly from
under her lace border and mufflings of muslin. No feeling towards their
father save a reverent loyalty did the Coleridge children ever learn
under Southey’s roof. But when the pale-faced wanderer returned from
Italy, he surprised and froze his daughter by a sudden revelation of that
jealousy which is the fond injustice of an unsatisfied heart, and which a
child who has freely given and taken love finds it hard to comprehend. “I
think my dear father,” writes Sara Coleridge, “was anxious that I should
learn to love him and the Wordsworths and their children, and not cling
so exclusively to my mother and all around me at home.” Love him and
revere his memory she did; to Wordsworth she was conscious of owing more
than to any other teacher or inspirer in matters of the intellect and
imagination. But in matters of the heart and conscience the daily life of
Southey was the book in which she read; he was, she would emphatically
declare, “upon the whole, the best man she had ever known.”

But the nepotism of the most “nepotious” uncle is not a perfect
substitute for fatherhood with its hopes and fears. May-morning of the
year 1804 saw “an Edithling very, very ugly, with no more beauty than a
young dodo,” nestling by Edith Southey’s side. A trembling thankfulness
possessed the little one’s father; but when the Arctic weather changed
suddenly to days of genial sunshine, and groves and gardens burst into
living greenery, and rang with song, his heart was caught into the
general joy. Southey was not without a presentiment that his young dodo
would improve. Soon her premature activity of eye and spirits troubled
him, and he tried, while cherishing her, to put a guard upon his heart.
“I did not mean to trust my affections again on so frail a foundation—and
yet the young one takes me from my desk and makes me talk nonsense as
fluently as you perhaps can imagine.” When Sara Coleridge—not yet five
years old, but already, as she half believed, promised in marriage to
Mr. De Quincey—returned after a short absence to Greta Hall, she saw her
baby cousin, sixteen months younger, and therefore not yet marriageable,
grown into a little girl very fair, with thick golden hair, and round,
rosy cheeks. Edith Southey inherited something of her father’s looks and
of his swift intelligence; with her growing beauty of face and limbs a
growing excellence of inward nature kept pace. At twenty she was the
“elegant cygnet” of Amelia Opie’s album verses,

“’Twas pleasant to meet
And see thee, famed Swan of the Derwent’s fair tide,
With that elegant cygnet that floats by thy side”—

a compliment her father mischievously would not let her Elegancy forget.
Those who would know her in the loveliness of youthful womanhood may turn
to Wordsworth’s poem, _The Triad_, where she appears first of the three
“sister nymphs” of Keswick and Rydal; or, Hartley Coleridge’s exquisite
sonnet, _To a lofty beauty, from her poor kinsman_:

“Methinks thy scornful mood,
And bearing high of stately womanhood—
Thy brow where Beauty sits to tyrannize
O’er humble love, had made me sadly fear thee:
For never sure was seen a royal bride,
Whose gentleness gave grace to so much pride—
My very thoughts would tremble to be near thee,
But when I see thee by thy father’s side
Old times unqueen thee, and old loves endear thee.”

But it is best of all to remember Southey’s daughter in connexion with
one letter of her father’s. In 1805 he visited Scotland alone; he had
looked forward to carrying on the most cherished purpose of his life—the
_History of Portugal_—among the libraries of Lisbon. But it would be
difficult to induce Mrs. Southey to travel with the Edithling. Could he
go alone? The short absence in Scotland served to test his heart, and so
to make his future clear:—

“I need not tell you, my own dear Edith, not to read my letters
aloud till you have first of all seen what is written only
for yourself. What I have now to say to you is, that having
been eight days from home, with as little discomfort, and as
little reason for discomfort, as a man can reasonably expect,
I have yet felt so little comfortable, so great sense of
solitariness, and so many homeward yearnings, that certainly I
will not go to Lisbon without you; a resolution which, if your
feelings be at all like mine, will not displease you. If, on
mature consideration, you think the inconvenience of a voyage
more than you ought to submit to, I must be content to stay
in England, as on my part it certainly is not worth while to
sacrifice a year’s happiness; for though not unhappy (my mind
is too active and too well disciplined to yield to any such
criminal weakness), still, without you I am not happy. But
for your sake as well as my own, and for little Edith’s sake,
I will not consent to any separation; the growth of a year’s
love between her and me, if it please God that she should live,
is a thing too delightful in itself, and too valuable in its
consequences, both to her and me, to be given up for any light
inconvenience either on your part or mine. An absence of a year
would make her effectually forget me.... But of these things we
will talk at leisure; only, dear, dear Edith, we must not part.”

Such wisdom of the heart was justified; the year of growing love bore
precious fruit. When Edith May was ten years old her father dedicated to
her, in verses laden with a father’s tenderest thoughts and feelings, his
_Tale of Paraguay_. He recalls the day of her birth, the preceding sorrow
for his first child, whose infant features have faded from him like a
passing cloud; the gladness of that singing month of May; the seasons
that followed during which he observed the dawning of the divine light in
her eyes; the playful guiles by which he won from her repeated kisses:
to him these ten years seem like yesterday; but to her they have brought
discourse of reason, with the sense of time and change:—

“And I have seen thine eyes suffused in grief
When I have said that with autumnal grey
The touch of old hath mark’d thy father’s head;
That even the longest day of life is brief,
And mine is falling fast into the yellow leaf.”

Other children followed, until a happy stir of life filled the house.
Emma, the quietest of infants, whose voice was seldom heard, and whose
dark-grey eyes too seldom shone in her father’s study, slipped quietly
out of the world after a hand’s-breadth of existence; but to Southey she
was no more really lost than the buried brother and sister were to the
cottage girl of Wordsworth’s _We are seven_. “I have five children,” he
says in 1809; “three of them at home, and two under my mother’s care
in heaven.” Of all, the most radiantly beautiful was Isabel; the most
passionately loved was Herbert. “My other two are the most perfect
contrast you ever saw. Bertha, whom I call Queen Henry the Eighth, from
her likeness to King Bluebeard, grows like Jonah’s gourd, and is the very
picture of robust health; and little Kate hardly seems to grow at all,
though perfectly well—she is round as a mushroom-button. Bertha, the
bluff queen, is just as grave as Kate is garrulous; they are inseparable
playfellows, and go about the house hand in hand.”

Among the inmates of Greta Hall, to overlook Lord Nelson and Bona
Marietta, with their numerous successors, would be a grave delinquency.
To be a cat, was to be a privileged member of the little republic to
which Southey gave laws. Among the fragments at the end of _The Doctor_
will be found a Chronicle History of the Cattery of Cat’s Eden; and some
of Southey’s frolic letters are written as if his whole business in
life were that of secretary for feline affairs in Greta Hall. A house,
he declared, is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment unless there
is in it a child rising three years old and a kitten rising six weeks;
“kitten is in the animal world what the rosebud is in the garden.” Lord
Nelson, an ugly specimen of the streaked-carroty or Judas-coloured
kind, yet withal a good cat, affectionate, vigilant, and brave, was
succeeded by Madame Bianchi, a beautiful and singular creature, white,
with a fine tabby tail; “her wild eyes were bright, and green as the
Duchess de Cadaval’s emerald necklace.” She fled away with her niece
Pulcheria on the day when good old Mrs. Wilson died; nor could any
allurements induce the pair to domesticate themselves again. For some
time a cloud of doom seemed to hang over Cat’s Eden. Ovid and Virgil,
Othello the Moor, and Pope Joan perished miserably. At last Fortune,
as if to make amends for her unkindness, sent to Greta Hall almost
together the never-to-be-enough-praised Rumpelstilzchen (afterwards
raised for services against rats to be His Serene Highness the Archduke
Rumpelstilzchen), and the equally-to-be-praised Hurly-burlybuss. With
whom too soon we must close the catalogue.

The revenue to maintain this household was in the main won by Southey’s
pen. “It is a difficult as well as a delicate task,” he wrote in the
_Quarterly Review_, “to advise a youth of ardent mind and aspiring
thoughts in the choice of a profession; but a wise man will have no
hesitation in exhorting him to choose anything rather than literature.
Better that he should seek his fortune before the mast, or with a musket
on his shoulder and a knapsack on his back; better that he should follow
the plough, or work at the loom or the lathe, or sweat over the anvil,
than trust to literature as the only means of his support.” Southey’s
own bent towards literature was too strong to be altered. But, while
he accepted loyally the burdens of his profession as a man of letters,
he knew how stout a back is needed to bear them month after month and
year after year. Absolutely dependent on his pen he was at no time. His
generous friend Wynn, upon coming of age, allowed him annually 160_l._,
until, in 1807, he was able to procure for Southey a Government pension
for literary services amounting, clear of taxes, to nearly the same
sum. Southey had as truly as any man the pride of independence, but he
had none of its vanity; there was no humiliation in accepting a service
from one whom friendship had made as close as a brother. Men, he says,
are as much better for the good offices which they receive as for those
they bestow; and his own was no niggard hand. Knowing both to give and
to take, with him the remembrance that he owed much to others was among
the precious possessions of life which bind us to our kind with bonds
of sonship, not of slavery. Of the many kindnesses which he received he
never forgot one. “Had it not been for your aid,” he writes to Wynn,
forty years after their first meeting in Dean’s Yard, “I should have
been irretrievably wrecked when I ran upon the shoals, with all sail
set, in the very outset of my voyage.” And to another good old friend,
who from his own modest station applauded while Southey ran forward in
the race:—“Do you suppose, Cottle, that I have forgotten those true and
most essential acts of friendship which you showed me when I stood most
in need of them? Your house was my house when I had no other. The very
money with which I bought my wedding-ring and paid my marriage-fees was
supplied by you. It was with your sisters I left Edith during my six
months’ absence, and for the six months after my return it was from
you that I received, week by week, the little on which we lived, till
I was enabled to live by other means. It is not the settling of a cash
account that can cancel obligations like these. You are in the habit of
preserving your letters, and if you were not, I would entreat you to
preserve _this_, that it might be seen hereafter.... My head throbs and
my eyes burn with these recollections. Good-night! my dear old friend and
benefactor.”

Anxiety about his worldly fortunes never cost Southey a sleepless night.
His disposition was always hopeful; relying on Providence, he says, I
could rely upon myself. When he had little, he lived upon little, never
spending when it was necessary to spare; and his means grew with his
expenses. Business habits he had none; never in his life did he cast up
an account; but in a general way he knew that money comes by honest toil
and grows by diligent husbandry. Upon Mrs. Southey, who had an eye to all
the household outgoings, the cares of this life fell more heavily. Sara
Coleridge calls to mind her aunt as she moved about Greta Hall intent on
house affairs, “with her fine figure and quietly commanding air.” Alas!
under this gracious dignity of manner the wear and tear of life were
doing their work surely. Still, it was honest wear and tear. “I never
knew her to do an unkind act,” says Southey, “nor say an unkind word;”
but when stroke followed upon stroke of sorrow, they found her without
that elastic temper which rises and recovers itself. Until the saddest
of afflictions made her helpless, everything was left to her management,
and was managed so quietly and well, that, except in times of sickness
and bereavement, “I had,” writes her husband, “literally no cares.” Thus
free from harass, Southey toiled in his library; he toiled not for bread
alone, but also for freedom. There were great designs before him which,
he was well aware, if ever realized, would make but a poor return to
the household coffer. To gain time and a vantage-ground for these, he
was content to yield much of his strength to work of temporary value,
always contriving, however, to strike a mean in this journeyman service
between what was most and least akin to his proper pursuits. When a
parcel of books arrived from the _Annual Review_, he groaned in spirit
over the sacrifice of time; but patience! it is, after all, better, he
would reflect, than pleading in a court of law; better than being called
up at midnight to a patient; better than calculating profit and loss at
a counter; better, in short, than anything but independence. “I am a
quiet, patient, easy-going hack of the mule breed”—he writes to Grosvenor
Bedford—“regular as clock-work in my pace, sure-footed, bearing the
burden which is laid on me, and only obstinate in choosing my own path.
If Gifford could see me by this fireside, where, like Nicodemus, one
candle suffices me in a large room, he would see a man in a coat ‘still
more threadbare than his own,’ when he wrote his ‘Imitation,’ working
hard and getting little—a bare maintenance, and hardly that; writing
poems and history for posterity with his whole heart and soul; one daily
progressive in learning, not so learned as he is poor, not so poor as
proud, not so proud as happy. Grosvenor, there is not a lighter-hearted
nor a happier man upon the face of this wide world.” When these words
were written, Herbert stood by his father’s side; it was sweet to work
that his boy might have his play-time glad and free.

The public estimate of Southey’s works as expressed in pounds, shillings,
and pence, was lowest where he held that it ought to have been highest.
For the _History of Brazil_, a work of stupendous toil, which no one in
England could have produced save Southey himself, he had not received,
after eight years, as much as for a single article in the _Quarterly
Review_. _Madoc_, the pillar, as he supposed, on which his poetical fame
was to rest; _Madoc_, which he dismissed with an awed feeling, as if in
it he were parting with a great fragment of his life, brought its author,
after twelve months’ sales, the sum of 3_l._ 17_s._ 1_d._ On the other
hand, for his _Naval Biography_, which interested him less than most of
his works, and which was undertaken after hesitation, he was promised
five hundred guineas a volume. Notwithstanding his unwearied exertions,
his modest scale of expenditure, and his profitable connexion with the
_Quarterly Review_—for an important article he would receive 100_l._—he
never had a year’s income in advance until that year, late in his life,
in which Sir Robert Peel offered him a baronetcy. In 1818, the lucky
payment of a bad debt enabled him to buy 300_l._ in the Three-per-cents.
“I have 100_l._ already there,” he writes “and shall then be worth 12_l._
per annum.” By 1821 this sum had grown to 625_l._, the gatherings of
half a life-time. In that year his friend John May, whose acquaintance
he had made in Portugal, and to whose kindness he was a debtor, suffered
the loss of his fortune. As soon as Southey had heard the state of
affairs, his decision was formed. “By this post,” he tells his friend, “I
write to Bedford, desiring that he will transfer to you 625_l._ in the
Three-per-cents. I wish it was more, and that I had more at my command in
any way. I shall in the spring, if I am paid for the first volume of my
History as soon as it is finished. One hundred I should, at all events,
have sent you then. It shall be as much more as I receive.” And he goes
on in cheery words to invite John May to break away from business and
come to Keswick, there to lay in “a pleasant store of recollections which
in all moods of mind are wholesome.” One rejoices that Southey, poor of
worldly goods, knew the happiness of being so simply and nobly generous.

Blue and white china, mediæval ivories, engravings by the Little Masters,
Chippendale cabinets, did not excite pining desire in Southey’s breast;
yet in one direction he indulged the passion of a collector. If, with
respect to any of “the things independent of the will,” he showed a want
of moderation unworthy of his discipleship to Epictetus, it was assuredly
with respect to books. Before he possessed a fixed home, he was already
moored to his folios; and when once he was fairly settled at Keswick,
many a time the carriers on the London road found their riding the larger
by a weighty packet on its way to Greta Hall. Never did he run north or
south for a holiday, but the inevitable parcel preceded or followed his
return. Never did he cross to the Continent but a bulkier bale arrived
in its own good time, enclosing precious things. His morality, in all
else void of offence, here yielded to the seducer. It is thought that
Southey was in the main honest; but if Dirk Hatteraick had run ashore
a hundred-weight of the Acta Sanctorum duty-free, the king’s laureate
was not the man to set the sharks upon him; and it is to be feared that
the pattern of probity, the virtuous Southey himself, might in such
circumstances be found, under cover of night, lugging his prize landwards
from its retreat beneath the rocks. Unquestionably, at one time certain
parcels from Portugal—only of such a size as could be carried under the
arm—were silently brought ashore to the defrauding of the revenue, and
somehow found their way, by-and-by, to Greta Hall. “We maintain a trade,”
says the Governor of the Strangers’ House in Bacon’s philosophical
romance, “not for gold, silver, or jewels, nor for silks, nor for spices,
nor any other commodity of matter, but only for God’s first creature,
which was _light_.” Such, too, was Southey’s trade, and he held that
God’s first creature is free to travel unchallenged by revenue-cutter.

“Why, Montesinos,” asks the ghostly Sir Thomas More in one of Southey’s
_Colloquies_, “with these books and the delight you take in their
constant society, what have you to covet or desire?” “Nothing,” is the
answer, “ ... except more books.” When Southey, in 1805, went to see
Walter Scott, it occurred to him in Edinburgh that, having had neither
new coat nor hat since little Edith was born, he must surely be in want
of both; and here, in the metropolis of the North, was an opportunity of
arraying himself to his desire. “Howbeit,” he says, “on considering the
really respectable appearance which my old ones made for a traveller—and
considering, moreover, that as learning was better than house or land,
it certainly must be much better than fine clothes—I laid out all my
money in books, and came home to wear out my old wardrobe in the winter.”
De Quincey called Southey’s library his wife, and in a certain sense
it was wife and mistress and mother to him. The presence and enjoying
of his books was not the sole delight they afforded; there was also
the pursuit, the surprisal, the love-making or wooing. And at last, in
his hours of weakness, once more a little child, he would walk slowly
round his library, looking at his cherished volumes, taking them down
mechanically, and when he could no longer read, pressing them to his
lips. In happier days the book-stalls of London knew the tall figure, the
rapid stride, the quick-seeing eye, the eager fingers. Lisbon, Paris,
Milan, Amsterdam, contributed to the rich confusion that, from time to
time, burdened the floors of library and bedrooms and passages in Greta
Hall. Above all, he was remembered at Brussels by that best of bookmen,
Verbeyst. What mattered it that Verbeyst was a sloven, now receiving his
clients with gaping shirt and now with stockingless feet? Did he not duly
honour letters, and had he not 300,000 volumes from which to choose?
If in a moment of prudential weakness one failed to carry off such a
treasure as the _Monumenta Boica_ or Colgar’s _Irish Saints_, there was
a chance that in Verbeyst’s vast store-house the volume might lurk for
a year or two. And Verbeyst loved his books, only less than he loved
his handsome, good-natured wife, who for a liberal customer would fetch
the bread and burgundy. Henry Taylor dwelt in Robert Southey’s heart of
hearts; but let not Henry Taylor treasonably hint that Verbeyst, the
prince of booksellers, had not a prince’s politeness of punctuality.
If sundry books promised had not arrived, it was because they were not
easily procured; moreover, the good-natured wife had died—_bien des
malheurs_, and Verbeyst’s heart was fallen into a lethargy. “Think ill of
our fathers which are in the Row, think ill of John Murray, think ill of
Colburn, think ill of the whole race of bibliopoles, except Verbeyst, who
is always to be thought of with liking and respect.” And when the bill of
lading, coming slow but sure, announced that saints and chroniclers and
poets were on their way, “by this day month,” wrote Southey, “they will
probably be here; then shall I be happier than if his Majesty King George
the Fourth were to give orders that I should be clothed in purple, and
sleep upon gold, and have a chain upon my neck, and sit next him because
of my wisdom, and be called his cousin.”

Thus the four thousand volumes, which lay piled about the library when
Southey first gathered his possessions together, grew and grew, year
after year, until the grand total mounted up to eight, to ten, to
fourteen thousand. Now Kirke White’s brother Neville sends him a gift of
Sir William Jones’s works, thirteen volumes, in binding of bewildering
loveliness. Now Landor ships from some Italian port a chest containing
treasures of less dubious value than the Raffaelles and Leonardos, with
which he liberally supplied his art-loving friends. Oh, the joy of
opening such a chest; of discovering the glorious folios; of glancing
with the shy amorousness of first desire at title-page and colophon; of
growing familiarity; of tracing out the history suggested by book-plate
or autograph; of finding a lover’s excuses for cropped margin, or
water-stain, or worm-hole! Then the calmer happiness of arranging his
favourites on new shelves; of taking them down again, after supper, in
the season of meditation and currant-rum; and of wondering for which
among his father’s books Herbert will care most when all of them shall
be his own. “It would please you,” Southey writes to his old comrade,
Bedford, “to see such a display of literary wealth, which is at once
the pride of my eye, and the joy of my heart, and the food of my mind;
indeed, more than metaphorically, meat, drink, and clothes for me and
mine. I verily believe that no one in my station was ever so rich before,
and I am very sure that no one in any station had ever a more thorough
enjoyment of riches of any kind or in any way.”

Southey’s Spanish and Portuguese collection—if Heber’s great library
be set aside—was probably the most remarkable gathering of such books
in the possession of any private person in this country. It included
several manuscripts, some of which were displayed with due distinction
upon brackets. Books in white and gold—vellum or parchment bound, with
gilt lettering in the old English type which Southey loved—were arranged
in effective positions pyramid-wise. Southey himself had learned the
mystery of book-binding, and from him his daughters acquired that art;
the ragged volumes were decently clothed in coloured cotton prints;
these, presenting a strange patch-work of colours, quite filled one room,
which was known as the Cottonian Library. “Paul,” a book-room on the
ground-floor, had been so called because “Peter,” the organ-room, was
robbed to fit it with books. “Paul is a great comfort to us, and being
dressed up with Peter’s property, makes a most respectable appearance,
and receives that attention which is generally shown to the youngest
child. The study has not actually been Petered on Paul’s account, but
there has been an exchange negotiated which we think is for their mutual
advantage. Twenty gilt volumes, from under the ‘Beauties of England and
Wales,’ have been marched down-stairs rank and file, and their place
supplied by the long set of Lope de Vega with green backs.”

Southey’s books, as he assures his ghostly monitor in the _Colloquies_,
were not drawn up on his shelves for display, however much the pride
of the eye might be gratified in beholding them; they were on actual
service. Generations might pass away before some of them would again find
a reader; in their mountain home they were prized and known as perhaps
they never had been known before. Not a few of the volumes had been cast
up from the wreck of family or convent libraries during the Revolution.
“Yonder Acta Sanctorum belonged to the Capuchines at Ghent. This book of
St. Bridget’s Revelations, in which not only all the initial letters are
illuminated, but every capital throughout the volume was coloured, came
from the Carmelite Nunnery at Bruges.... Here are books from Colbert’s
library; here others from the Lamoignon one.... Yonder Chronicle History
of King D. Manoel, by Damiam de Goes; and yonder General History of
Spain, by Esteban de Garibay, are signed by their respective authors....
This Copy of Casaubon’s Epistles was sent to me from Florence by Walter
Landor. He had perused it carefully, and to that perusal we are indebted
for one of the most pleasing of his Conversations.... Here is a book
with which Lauderdale amused himself, when Cromwell kept him in prison
in Windsor Castle.... Here I possess these gathered treasures of time,
the harvest of many generations, laid up in my garners: and when I go to
the window, there is the lake, and the circle of the mountains, and the
illimitable sky.”

Not a few of his books were dead, and to live among these was like living
among the tombs; “Behold, this also is vanity,” Southey makes confession.
But when Sir Thomas questions, “Has it proved to you ‘vexation of
spirit’ also?” the Cumberland mountain-dweller breaks forth: “Oh no! for
never can any man’s life have been passed more in accord with his own
inclinations, nor more answerably to his desires. Excepting that peace
which, through God’s infinite mercy, is derived from a higher source,
it is to literature, humanly speaking, that I am beholden, not only for
the means of subsistence, but for every blessing which I enjoy; health
of mind and activity of mind, contentment, cheerfulness, continual
employment, and therefore continual pleasure. _Suavissima vita indies
sentire se fieri meliorem_; and this, as Bacon has said and Clarendon
repeated, is the benefit that a studious man enjoys in retirement.” Such
a grave gladness underlay all Southey’s frolic moods, and in union with
a clear-sighted acceptance of the conditions of human happiness—its
inevitable shocks, its transitory nature as far as it belongs to man’s
life on earth—made up part of his habitual temper.

Southey coursed from page to page with a greyhound’s speed; a tiny _s_
pencilled in the margin served to indicate what might be required for
future use. Neatness he had learnt from Miss Tyler long ago; and by
experience he acquired his method. On a slip of paper which served as
marker he would note the pages to which he needed to return. In the
course of a few hours he had classified and arranged everything in a book
which it was likely he would ever want. A reference to the less important
passages sufficed; those of special interest were transcribed by his
wife, or one of his daughters, or more frequently by Southey himself;
finally, these transcripts were brought together in packets under such
headings as would make it easy to discover any portion of their contents.

Such was his ordinary manner of eviscerating an author, but it was
otherwise with the writers of his affection. On some—such as Jackson
and Jeremy Taylor—“he _fed_,” as he expressed it, “slowly and
carefully, dwelling on the page, and taking in its contents, deeply
and deliberately, like an epicure with his wine ‘searching the subtle
flavour.’” Such chosen writers remained for all times and seasons
faithful and cherished friends:—

“With them I take delight in weal,
And seek relief in woe;
And while I understand and feel
How much to them I owe,
My cheeks have often been bedewed
With tears of thankful gratitude.”

“If I were confined to a score of English books,” says Southey, “Sir
Thomas Browne would, I think, be one of them; nay, probably it would be
one if the selection were cut down to twelve. My library, if reduced
to those bounds, would consist of Shakspeare, Chaucer, Spenser, and
Milton; Jackson, Jeremy Taylor, and South; Isaac Walton, Sidney’s
Arcadia, Fuller’s Church History, and Sir Thomas Browne; and what a
wealthy and well-stored mind would that man have, what an inexhaustible
reservoir, what a Bank of England to draw upon for profitable thoughts
and delightful associations, who should have fed upon them!” It must
have gone hard with Southey, in making out this list, to exclude
Clarendon, and doubtless if the choice were not limited to books written
in English, the Utopia would have urged its claim to admission. With
less difficulty he could skip the whole of the eighteenth century. From
_Samson Agonistes_ to _The Task_, there was no English poem which held
a foremost place in his esteem. Berkeley and Butler he valued highly;
but Robert South seemed to him the last of the race of the giants. An
ancestral connection with Locke was not a source of pride to Southey; he
respected neither the philosopher’s politics nor his metaphysics; still,
it is pleasant, he says, to hear of somebody between one’s self and Adam
who has left a name.

Four volumes of what are called Southey’s _Commonplace Books_ have been
published, containing some three thousand double-column pages; and
these are but a selection from the total mass of his transcripts. It is
impossible to give a notion of a miscellany drawn from so wide-ranging
a survey of poetry, biography, history, travels, topography, divinity,
not in English alone, but also in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese. Yet certain main lines can be traced which give some
meaning to this huge accumulation. It is easy to perceive that the
collector wrought under an historical bias, and that social, literary,
and ecclesiastical history were the directions in which the historical
tendency found its play. Such work of transcribing, though it did not
rest Southey’s hand, was a relief to his mind after the excitement of
composition, and some of it may pass for a kind of busy idleness; but
most of his transcripts were made with a definite purpose—that of
furnishing materials for work either actually accomplished or still in
prospect, when at last the brain grew dull and the fingers slack. “I
am for ever making collections,” he writes, “and storing up materials
which may not come into use till the Greek Calends. And this I have been
doing for five-and-twenty years! It is true that I draw daily upon my
hoards, and should be poor without them; but in prudence I ought now to
be working up those materials rather than adding to so much dead stock.”
When Ticknor visited him in 1819, Southey opened for the young American
his great bundles of manuscript materials for the _History of Portugal_,
and the _History of the Portuguese East Indies_. Southey had charmed him
by the kindness of his reception; by the air of culture and of goodness
in his home; by his talk, bright and eager, “for the quickness of his
mind expresses itself in the fluency of his utterance; and yet he is
ready upon almost any subject that can be proposed to him, from the
extent of his knowledge.” And now, when Ticknor saw spread before him
the evidence of such unexampled industry, a kind of bewilderment took
possession of him. “Southey,” he writes in his diary, “is certainly an
extraordinary man, one of those whose characters I find it difficult
to comprehend, because I hardly know how such elements can be brought
together, such rapidity of mind with such patient labour and wearisome
exactness, so mild a disposition with so much nervous excitability, and
a poetical talent so elevated with such an immense mass of minute, dull
learning.”

If Ticknor had been told that this was due to Epictetus, it might have
puzzled him still more; but it is certain that only through the strenuous
appliance of will to the formation of character could Southey have
grown to be what he was. He had early been possessed by the belief
that he must not permit himself to become the slave or the victim of
sensibility, but that in the little world of man there are two powers
ruling by a Divine right—reason and conscience, in loyal obedience to
which lies our highest freedom. Then, too, the circumstances of his life
prompted him to self-mastery and self-management. That he should every
day overtake a vast amount of work, was not left to his choosing or
declining—it was a matter of necessity; to accomplish this, he must get
all possible advantage out of his rapidity of intellect and his energy
of feeling, and at the same time he must never put an injurious strain
on these. It would not do for Southey to burn away to-day in some white
flame of excitement the nerve which he needed for use to-morrow. He
could not afford to pass a sleepless night. If his face glowed or his
brain throbbed, it was a warning that he had gone far enough. His very
susceptibility to nervous excitement rendered caution the more requisite.
William Taylor had compared him to the mimosa. Hazlitt remembered him
with a quivering lip, a hectic flush upon his cheek, a roving fire in
his eye, a falcon glance, a look at once aspiring and dejected. Crabb
Robinson found in him a likeness to Shelley. Humphry Davy had proved
the fineness of his sensibility by that odd neurometer, the nitrous
oxide. “The truth is,” writes Southey, “that though some persons, whose
knowledge of me is scarcely skin-deep, suppose I have no nerves, because
I have great self-control as far as regards the surface, if it were not
for great self-management, and what may be called a strict intellectual
regimen, I should very soon be in a deplorable state of what is called
nervous disease, and this would have been the case any time during the
last twenty years.” And again: “A man had better break a bone, or even
lose a limb, than shake his nervous system. I, who never talk about my
nerves (and am supposed to have none by persons who see as far into me as
they do into a stone wall), know this.” Southey could not afford to play
away his health at hazard, and then win it back in the lounge of some
foreign watering-place. His plan, on the contrary, was to keep it, and to
think about it as little as possible. A single prescription sufficed for
a life-time—_In labore quies._ “I think I may lay claim,” he says, “to
the praise of self-management both in body and mind without paying too
much attention to either—exercising a diseased watchfulness, or playing
any tricks with either.” It would not have been difficult for Southey,
with such a temperament as his, to have wrecked himself at the outset
of his career. With beautiful foiled lives of young men Southey had a
peculiar sympathy. But the gods sometimes give white hairs as an aureole
to their favoured ones. Perhaps, on the whole, for him it was not only
more prudent but also more chivalrous to study to be quiet; to create a
home for those who looked to him for security; to guard the happiness of
tender women; to make smooth ways for the feet of little children; to
hold hands in old age with the friends of his youth; to store his mind
with treasures of knowledge; to strengthen and chasten his own heart;
to grow yearly in love for his country and her venerable heritage of
manners, virtue, laws; to add to her literature the outcome of an adult
intellect and character; and having fought a strenuous and skilful fight,
to fall as one whose sword an untimely stroke has shattered in his hand.

CHAPTER V.

WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803-1839 (_continued_).

The texture of Southey’s life was so uniform, the round from morning
till night repeated itself with so much regularity, that one day may
stand as representative of a thousand. We possess his record of how the
waking hours went by when he was about thirty years old, and a similar
record written when he was twice that age. His surroundings had changed
in the mean time, and he himself had changed; the great bare room which
he used from the first as a study, fresh plastered in 1804, with the
trowel-lines on the ceiling pierced by the flaws of winter, containing
two chairs and a little table—“God help me!” he exclaims, “I look in
it like a cock-robin in a church”—this room had received, long before
1834, its lining of comely books, its white and gold pyramids, its
brackets, its cherished portraits. The occupant of the study had the
same spare frame, the same aspect of lightness and of strength, the
same full eyebrows shadowing the dark-brown eyes, the same variously
expressive muscular mouth; the youthful wildness in his countenance had
given place to a thoughtful expression, and the abundant hair still
clustering over his great brow was snowy white. Whatever had changed,
his habits—though never his tyrants—remained, with some variations in
detail, the same. “My actions,” he writes to a friend not very long
after his arrival in Keswick, “are as regular as those of St. Dunstan’s
quarter-boys. Three pages of history after breakfast (equivalent to five
in small quarto printing); then to transcribe and copy for the press, or
to make my selections and biographies, or what else suits my humour till
dinner-time; from dinner to tea I read, write letters, see the newspaper,
and very often indulge in a siesta—for sleep agrees with me.... After tea
I go to poetry, and correct, and rewrite, and copy till I am tired, and
then turn to anything else till supper; and this is my life—which, if it
be not a very merry one, is yet as happy as heart could wish.” “See how
the day is disposed of!” begins the later record; “I get out of bed as
the clock strikes six, and shut the house-door after me as it strikes
seven.[8] After two hours with Davies, home to breakfast, after which
Cuthbert engages me till about half-past ten, and when the post brings
no letters that either interest or trouble me (for of the latter I have
many), by eleven I have done with the newspaper, and can then set about
what is properly the business of the day. But letters are often to be
written, and I am liable to frequent interruptions; so that there are not
many mornings in which I can command from two to three unbroken hours at
the desk. At two I take my daily walk, be the weather what it may, and
when the weather permits, with a book in my hand; dinner at four, read
about half an hour; then take to the sofa with a different book, and
after a few pages get my soundest sleep, till summoned to tea at six.
My best time during the winter is by candle-light; twilight interferes
with it a little; and in the season of company I can never count upon an
evening’s work. Supper at half-past nine, after which I read an hour, and
then to bed. The greatest part of my miscellaneous work is done in the
odds and ends of time.”

It was part of Southey’s regimen to carry on several works at once;
this he found to be economy of time, and he believed it necessary for
the preservation of his health. Whenever one object entirely occupied
his attention, it haunted him, oppressed him, troubled his dreams. The
remedy was simple—to do one thing in the morning, another in the evening.
To lay down poetry and presently to attack history seems feasible, and
no ill policy for one who is forced to take all he can out of himself;
but Southey would turn from one poetical theme to another, and could
day by day advance with a pair of epics. This was a source of unfailing
wonder to Landor. “When I write a poem,” he says, “my heart and all my
feelings are upon it.... High poems will not admit flirtation.” Little
by little was Southey’s way, and so he got on with many things. “Last
night,” he writes to Bedford, “I began the Preface [to _Specimens of
English Poets_]—huzza! And now, Grosvenor, let me tell you what I have to
do. I am writing—1. _The History of Portugal_; 2. _The Chronicle of the
Cid_; 3. _The Curse of Kehama_; 4. _Espriella’s Letters_. Look you, all
these _I am_ writing.... By way of interlude comes in this preface. Don’t
swear, and bid me do one thing at a time. I tell you I can’t afford to
do one thing at a time—no, nor two neither; and it is only by doing many
things that I contrive to do so much: for I cannot work long together
at anything without hurting myself, and so I do everything by heats;
then, by the time I am tired of one, my inclination for another is come
round.” A strong, deliberate energy, accordingly, is at the back of all
Southey’s work; but not that blind creative rapture which will have its
own way, and leaves its subject weak but appeased. “In the day-time
I laboured,” says Landor, “and at night unburdened my soul, shedding
many tears. My _Tiberius_ has so shaken me at last that the least thing
affects me violently.” Southey shrank back from such agitations. A great
Elizabethan poet is described by one of his contemporaries as one standing

“Up to the chin in the Pierian flood.”

Southey did not wade so far; he stepped down calmly until the smooth
waters touched his waist; dipped seven times, and returned to the bank.
It was a beautiful and an elevating rite; but the waves sing with lyric
lips only in the midmost stream; and he who sings with them, and is swift
as they, need not wonder if he sink after a time, faint, breathless,
delighted.

Authorship, it must be remembered, was Southey’s trade, the business
of his life, and this, at least, he knew how to conduct well. To be a
prophet and call down flame from heaven, and disappear in a whirlwind
and a chariot of fire, is sublime; but prophets can go in the strength
of a single meal for more days and nights than one would choose to name
in this incredulous age, and, if they eat, there are ravens to bring
them food. No ravens brought loaves to Greta Hall; and Southey had an
unprophet-like craving for the creature comforts of beef and bread, for
wine if it might be had, and at supper for one meditative tumbler of
punch or black-currant rum. Besides, what ravens were ever pledged to
feed a prophet’s sisters-in-law, or his nephews and nieces? Let it be
praise enough for much of Southey’s performance that he did good work in
workmanlike fashion. To shift knowledge into more convenient positions
is to render no unimportant service to mankind. In the gathering of
facts, Southey was both swift and patient in an extraordinary degree;
he went often alone, and he went far; in the art of exposition he was
unsurpassed; and his fine moral feeling and profound sympathy with
elementary justice created, as De Quincey has observed, a soul under what
else might well be denominated, Miltonically, “the ribs of death.” From
the mending of his pens to the second reading aloud of his proof-sheets,
attending as he read to the fall of each word upon the ear, Southey
had a diligent care for everything that served to make his work right.
He wrote at a moderate pace; re-wrote; wrote a third time if it seemed
desirable; corrected with minute supervision. He accomplished so much,
not because he produced with unexampled rapidity, but because he worked
regularly, and never fell into a mood of apathy or ennui. No periods of
tempestuous vacancy lay between his periods of patient labour. One work
always overlapped another—thus, that first idle day, the begetter of so
many idle descendants, never came. But let us hear the craftsman giving a
lesson in the knack of authorship to his brother, Dr. Henry Southey, who
has a notion of writing something on the Crusades:

“Now then, supposing that you will seriously set about the
_Crusades_, I will give you such directions in the art of
historical book-keeping as may save time and facilitate labour.

“Make your writing-books in foolscap quarto, and write on
only one side of a leaf; draw a line down the margin, marking
off space enough for your references, which should be given
at the end of every paragraph; noting page, book, or chapter
of the author referred to. This minuteness is now demanded,
and you will yourself find it useful; for, in transcribing or
in correcting proofs, it is often requisite to turn to the
original authorities. Take the best author; that is to say,
the one that has written most at length of all the _original_
authors, upon the particular point of time on which you are
employed, and draw up your account from him; then, on the
opposite page, correct and amplify this from every other who
has written on the same subject. This page should be divided
into two columns, one of about two-thirds of its breadth, the
other the remaining one. You are thus enabled to _add_ to your
_additions_.

“One of these books you should have for your geography; that
is to say, for collecting descriptions of all the principal
scenes of action (which must be done from books of travels),
their situation, their strength, their previous history, and
in the notes, their present state. [Another book—he adds in a
subsequent letter—you must keep for the bibliography of your
subject.]

“These descriptions you can insert in their proper places when
you transcribe. Thus, also, you should collect accounts of
the different tribes and dynasties which you have occasion to
mention. In this manner the information which is only to be got
at piecemeal, and oftentimes incidentally, when you are looking
for something else, is brought together with least trouble, and
almost imperceptibly.

“All relative matter not absolutely essential to the subject
should go in the form of supplementary notes, and these you
may make as amusing as you please, the more so, and the more
curious, the better. Much trouble is saved by writing them
on separate bits of paper, each the half of a quarter of a
foolscap sheet—numbering them, and making an index of them; in
this manner they are ready for use when they are wanted.

“It was some time before I fell unto this system of
book-keeping, and I believe no better can be desired. A Welsh
triad might comprehend all the rules of style. Say what you
have to say as _perspicuously_ as possible, as _briefly_ as
possible, and as _rememberably_ as possible, and take no other
thought about it. Omit none of those little circumstances which
give life to narration, and bring old manners, old feelings,
and old times before your eyes.”

Winter was Southey’s harvest season. Then for weeks no visitor knocked at
Greta Hall, except perhaps Mr. Wordsworth, who had plodded all the way
from Rydal on his indefatigable legs. But in summer interruptions were
frequent, and Southey, who had time for everything, had time to spare not
only for friends but for strangers. The swarm of lakers was, indeed, not
what it is now-a-days, but to a studious man it was, perhaps, not less
formidable. By Gray’s time the secret of the lakes had been found out;
and if the visitors were fewer, they were less swift upon the wing, and
their rank or fame often entitled them to particular attention. Coroneted
coaches rolled into Keswick, luggage-laden; the American arrived
sometimes to make sure that Derwentwater would not be missed out of Lake
Michigan, sometimes to see King George’s laureate; and cultured Americans
were particularly welcome to Southey. Long-vacation reading-parties
from Oxford and Cambridge—known among the good Cumberland folk as the
“cathedrals”—made Keswick a resort. Well for them if, provided with an
introduction, they were invited to dine at Greta Hall, were permitted to
gaze on the choice old Spaniards, and to converse with the laureate’s
stately Edith and her learned cousin. Woe to them if, after the
entanglements of a Greek chorus or descriptions of the temperate man and
the magnanimous man, they sought to restore their tone by a cat-worrying
expedition among the cottages of Keswick. Southey’s cheek glowed, his
eye darkened and flashed, if he chanced to witness cruelty; some of the
Cambridge “cathedrals” who received a letter concerning cats in July,
1834, may still bear the mark of its leaded thong in their moral fibre,
and be the better for possessing Southey’s sign-manual.

A young step-child of Oxford visited Keswick in the winter of 1811-12,
and sought the acquaintance of the author of _Thalaba_. Had Southey
been as intolerant or as unsympathetic as some have represented him,
he could not have endured the society of one so alien in opinion and
so outspoken as Shelley. But courtesy, if it were nothing more, was at
least part of Southey’s self-respect; his intolerance towards persons
was, in truth, towards a certain ideal, a certain group of opinions;
when hand touched hand and eye met eye, all intolerance vanished, and
he was open to every gracious attraction of character and manner. There
was much in Shelley that could not fail to interest Southey; both loved
poetry, and both felt the proud, secluded grandeur of Landor’s verse;
both loved men, and thought the world wants mending, though their plans
of reform might differ. That Shelley was a rebel expelled from Oxford did
not shock Southey, who himself had been expelled from Westminster and
rejected at Christ Church. Shelley’s opinions were crude and violent,
but their spirit was generous, and such opinions held by a youth in his
teens generally mean no more than that his brain is working and his heart
ardent. Shelley’s rash marriage reminded Southey of another marriage,
celebrated at Bristol some fifteen years ago, which proved that rashness
is not always folly. The young man’s admiration of _Thalaba_ spoke well
for him; and certainly during the earlier weeks of their intercourse
there was on Shelley’s part a becoming deference to one so much his
superior in years and in learning, deference to one who had achieved
much while Shelley still only dreamed of achievement. Southey thought
he saw in the revolutionary enthusiast an image of his former self.
“Here,” he says, “is a man at Keswick who acts upon me as my own ghost
would do. He is just what I was in 1794. His name is Shelley, son to the
member for Shoreham.... At present he has got to the Pantheistic stage of
philosophy, and in the course of a week I expect he will be a Berkeleyan,
for I have put him upon a course of Berkeley. It has surprised him a good
deal to meet, for the first time in his life, with a man who perfectly
understands him and does him full justice. I tell him that all the
difference between us is that he is nineteen and I am thirty-seven; and
I daresay it will not be very long before I shall succeed in convincing
him that he may be a true philosopher and do a great deal of good with
6000_l._ a year; the thought of which troubles him a great deal more at
present than ever the want of sixpence (for I have known such a want)
did me.” There were other differences between Robert Southey and the
inconstant star that passed by Greta Hall than that of years. Southey had
quickly learned to put a bound to his desires, and within that bound to
work out for himself a possession of measureless worth. It seemed to him
part of a man’s virtue to adhere loyally to the bond signed for each of
us when we enter life. Is our knowledge limited—then let us strive within
those limits. Can we never lay hands on the absolute good—then let us
cherish the good things that are ours. Do we hold our dearest possessions
on a limited tenure—that is hard, but is it not in the bond? How faint a
loyalty is his who merely yields obedience perforce! let us rather cast
in our will, unadulterated and whole, with that of our divine Leader;
_sursum corda_—there is a heaven above. But Shelley—the nympholept of
some radiant ante-natal sphere—fled through his brief years ever in
pursuit of his lost lady of light; and for him loyalty to the bond of
life seemed to mean a readiness to forget all things, however cherished,
so soon as they had fulfilled their service of speeding him on towards
the unattainable. It could not but be that men living under rules so
diverse should before long find themselves far asunder. But they parted
in 1812 in no spirit of ill-will. Southey was already a state-pensioner
and a champion of the party of order in the _Quarterly Review_; this did
not prevent the young apostle of liberty and fraternity from entering
his doors, and enjoying Mrs. Southey’s tea-cakes. Irish affairs were
earnestly discussed; but Southey, who had written generously of Emmett
both in his verse and in the _Quarterly_, could not be hostile to one
whose illusions were only over-sanguine; and while the veritable Southey
was before Shelley’s eyes, he could not discern the dull hireling, the
venomous apostate, the cold-blooded assassin, of freedom conjured up by
Byron and others to bear Southey’s name.

Three years later Shelley presented his _Alastor_ to the laureate,
and Southey duly acknowledged the gift. The elder poet was never slow
to recognize genius in young men, but conduct was to him of higher
importance than genius; he deplored some acts in Shelley’s life which
seemed to result directly from opinions professed at Keswick in
1811—opinions then interpreted as no more than the disdain of checks
felt by every spirited boy. Southey heard no more from him until a
letter came from Pisa inquiring whether Shelley’s former entertainer at
Keswick were his recent critic of the _Quarterly Review_, with added
comments, courteous but severe, on Southey’s opinions. The reply was
that Southey had not written the paper, and had never in any of his
writings alluded to Shelley in any way. A second letter followed on each
side, the elder man pleading, exhorting, warning; the younger justifying
himself, and returning to the attack. “There the correspondence ended.
On Shelley’s part it was conducted with the courtesy which was natural
to him; on mine, in the spirit of one who was earnestly admonishing a
fellow-creature.”

Much of Southey’s time—his most valued possession—was given to his
correspondents. Napoleon’s plan of answering letters, according to
Bourrienne, was to let them lie unopened for six weeks, by which time
nine out of ten had answered themselves, or had been answered by
history. Coleridge’s plan—says De Quincey—was shorter; he opened none,
and answered none. To answer all forthwith was the habit of Southey.
Thinking doubtless of their differences in such minor moralities of life,
Coleridge writes of his brother-in-law:—“Always employed, his friends
find him always at leisure. No less punctual in trifles than steadfast in
the performance of highest duties, he inflicts none of those small pains
which irregular men scatter about them, and which in the aggregate so
often become formidable obstacles both to happiness and utility; while,
on the contrary, he bestows all the pleasures and inspires all that ease
of mind on those around or connected with him, which perfect consistency
and (if such a word might be framed) absolute _reliability_, equally in
small as in great concerns, cannot but inspire and bestow; when this,
too, is softened without being weakened by kindness and gentleness.”
Odd indeed wore some of the communications for which the poet-laureate,
the Tory reformer, and the loyal son of the Church was the mark. Now
a clergyman writes to furnish him with Scriptural illustrations of
_Thalaba_; now another clergyman favours him with an ingenious parallel
between Kehama and Nebuchadnezzar; now some anonymous person seriously
urges on Southey his duty of making a new version of the Psalms, and
laying it before the King to be approved and appointed to be sung in
churches; now a lunatic poet desires his brother to procure for his
title-page the names of Messrs. Longman and Rees; now a poor woman,
wife to a blind Homer, would have him led carefully to the summit of
Parnassus; now a poor French devil volunteers to translate _Roderick_ if
the author will have the goodness to send him a copy—even a defective
copy—which he pledges himself religiously to return; now a Yankee, who
keeps an exhibition at Philadelphia, modestly asks for Southey’s painted
portrait, “which is very worthy a place in my collection;” now a herdsman
in the vale of Clwyd requests permission to send specimens of prose and
verse—his highest ambition is the acquaintance of learned men; now the
Rev. Peter Hall begs to inform Southey that he has done more harm to
the cause of religion than any writer of the age; now a lover requests
him to make an acrostic on the name of a young lady—the lover’s rival
has beaten him in writing verses; enclosed is the honorarium. Southey’s
amiability at this point gave way; he did not write the acrostic, and
the money he spent on blankets for poor women in Keswick. A society for
the suppression of albums was proposed by Southey; yet sometimes he was
captured in the gracious mood. Samuel Simpson, of Liverpool, begs for
a few lines in his handwriting “to fill a vacancy in his collection
of autographs, without which his series must remain for ever most
incomplete.” The laureate replies:

“Inasmuch as you Sam, a descendant of Sim,
For collecting handwritings have taken a whim,
And to me, Robert Southey, petition have made,
In a civil and nicely-penned letter—post-paid—
That I to your album so gracious would be
As to fill up a page there appointed for me,
Five couplets I send you, by aid of the Nine—
They will cost you in postage a penny a line:
At Keswick, October the sixth, they were done,
One thousand eight hundred and twenty and one.”

Some of Southey’s distractions were of his own inviting. Soon after his
arrival at Keswick, a tiny volume of poems entitled _Clifton Grove_,
attracted his attention; its author was an undergraduate of Cambridge.
The _Monthly Review_ having made the discovery that it rhymed in one
place _boy_ and _sky_, dismissed the book contemptuously. Southey could
not bear to think that the hopes of a lad of promise should be blasted,
and he wrote to Henry Kirke White, encouraging him, and offering him help
towards a future volume. The cruel dulness of the reviewer sat heavily
on the poor boy’s spirits, and these unexpected words of cheer came with
most grateful effect. It soon appeared, however, that Southey’s services
must be slight, for his new acquaintance was taken out of his hands by
Mr. Simeon, the nursing-father of Evangelicalism. At no time had Southey
any leanings towards the Clapham Sect; and so, while he tried to be of
use to Kirke White indirectly, their correspondence ceased. When the
lad, in every way lacking pith and substance, and ripening prematurely
in a heated atmosphere, drooped and died, Southey was not willing that
he should be altogether forgotten; he wrote offering to look over
whatever papers there might be, and to give an opinion on them. “Down
came a box-full,” he tells Duppa, “the sight of which literally made
my heart ache and my eyes overflow, for never did I behold such proofs
of human industry. To make short, I took the matter up with interest,
collected his letters, and have, at the expense of more time than such
a poor fellow as myself can very well afford, done what his family are
very grateful for, and what I think the world will thank me for too. Of
course I have done it gratuitously.... That I should become, and that
voluntarily too, an editor of Methodistical and Calvinistic letters,
is a thing which, when I think of, excites the same sort of smile that
the thought of my pension does.” A brief statement that his own views
on religion differed widely from those of Kirke White sufficed to save
Southey’s integrity. The genius of the dead poet he overrated; it was an
error which the world has since found time to correct.

This was but one of a series of many instances in which Southey, stemming
the pressure of his own engagements, asserted the right to be generous of
his time and strength and substance to those who had need of such help
as a sound heart and a strong arm can give. William Roberts, a Bristol
bank-clerk, dying of consumption at nineteen, left his only possession,
some manuscript poems, in trust to be published for the benefit of a
sister whom he passionately loved. Southey was consulted, and at once
bestirred himself on behalf of the projected volume. Herbert Knowles,
an orphan lad at school in Yorkshire, had hoped to go as a sizar to St.
John’s; his relations were unable to send him; could he help himself by
publishing a poem? might he dedicate it to the laureate? The poem came to
Southey, who found it “brimful of power and of promise;” he represented
to Herbert the folly of publishing, promised ten pounds himself, and
procured from Rogers and Earl Spencer twenty more. Herbert Knowles, in
a wise and manly letter, begged that great things might not be expected
of him; he would not be idle, his University career should be at least
respectable:—“Suffice it, then, to say, _I thank you from my heart_;
let time and my future conduct tell the rest.” Death came to arbitrate
between his hopes and fears. James Dusautoy, another schoolboy, one of
ten children of a retired officer, sent specimens of his verse, asking
Southey’s opinion on certain poetical plans. His friends thought the
law the best profession for him; how could he make literature help him
forward in his profession? Southey again advised against publication,
but by a well-timed effort enabled him to enter Emanuel College.
Dusautoy, after a brilliant promise, took fever, died, and was buried, in
acknowledgment of his character and talents, in the college cloisters.
When at Harrogate in the summer of 1827, Southey received a letter,
written with much modesty and good feeling, from John Jones, an old
serving-man; he enclosed a poem on “The Redbreast,” and would take the
liberty, if permitted, to offer other manuscripts for inspection. Touches
of true observation and natural feeling in the verses on the little
bird with “look oblique and prying head and gentle affability” pleased
Southey, and he told his humble applicant to send his manuscript book,
warning him, however, not to expect that such poems would please the
public—“the time for them was gone by, and whether the public had grown
wiser in these matters or not, it had certainly become less tolerant
and less charitable.” By procuring subscribers and himself contributing
an Introductory Essay on the lives and works of our Uneducated Poets,
Southey secured a slender fortune for the worthy old man, who laid the
table none the less punctually because he loved Shakespeare and the
Psalter, or carried in his head some simple rhymes of his own. It pleased
Southey to show how much intellectual pleasure and moral improvement
connected with such pleasure are within reach of the humblest; thus a
lesson was afforded to those who would have the March of Intellect beaten
only to the tune of _Ça ira_. “Before I conclude”—so the Introduction
draws to an end—“I must, in my own behalf, give notice to all whom it may
concern that I, Robert Southey, Poet-laureate, being somewhat advanced
in years, and having business enough of my own fully to occupy as much
time as can be devoted to it, consistently with a due regard to health,
do hereby decline perusing or inspecting any manuscript from any person
whatsoever, and desire that no application on that score may be made
to me from this time forth; this resolution, which for most just cause
is taken and here notified, being, like the laws of the Medes and the
Persians, not to be changed.”

It was some time after this public announcement that a hand, which may
have trembled while yet it was very brave and resolute, dropped into
the little post-office at Haworth, in Yorkshire, a packet for Robert
Southey. His bold truthfulness, his masculine self-control, his strong
heart, his domestic temper sweet and venerable, his purity of manners, a
certain sweet austerity, attracted to him women of fine sensibility and
genius who would fain escape from their own falterings and temerities
under the authority of a faithful director. Already Maria del Occidente,
“the most impassioned and most imaginative of all poetesses,” had
poured into his ear the tale of her slighted love. Newly come from
Paris, and full of enthusiasm for the Poles, she hastened to Keswick
to see in person her sympathetic adviser; she proved, says Southey, a
most interesting person of the mildest and gentlest manners. With him
she left, on returning to America, her _Zophiel_ in manuscript, the
publication of which he superintended. “_Zophiel_, Southey says, is by
some Yankee woman”—Charles Lamb breaks forth—“as if there ever had been
a woman capable of anything so great!” Now, in 1837, a woman of finer
spirit, and capable of higher things than _Zophiel_, addressed a letter
to Robert Southey, asking his judgment of her powers as disclosed in
the poems which she forwarded. For some weeks Charlotte Brontë waited,
until almost all hope of a reply was lost. At length the verdict came.
Charlotte Brontë’s verse was assuredly written with her left hand; her
passionate impulses, crossed and checked by fiery fiats of the will,
would not mould themselves into little stanzas; the little stanzas must
be correct, therefore they must reject such irregular heavings and swift
repressions of the heart. Southey’s delay in replying had been caused
by absence from home. A little personal knowledge of a poet in the
decline of life might have tempered her enthusiasm; yet he is neither a
disappointed nor a discontented man; she will never hear from him any
chilling sermons on the text. All is vanity; the faculty of verse she
possesses in no inconsiderable degree; but this, since the beginning of
the century, has grown to be no rare possession; let her beware of making
literature her profession, check day-dreams, and find her chief happiness
in her womanly duties; then she may write poetry for its own sake, not
in a spirit of emulation, not through a passion for celebrity; the
less celebrity is aimed at, the more it is likely to be deserved. “Mr.
Southey’s letter,” said Charlotte Brontë, many years later, “was kind
and admirable, a little stringent, but it did me good.” She wrote again,
striving to repress a palpitating joy and pride in the submission to her
director’s counsel, and the sacrifice of her cherished hopes; telling him
more of her daily life, of her obedience to the day’s duty, her efforts
to be sensible and sober: “I had not ventured,” she says, “to hope for
such a reply—so considerate in its tone, so noble in its spirit.” Once
more Southey wrote, hoping that she would let him see her at the Lakes:
“You would then think of me afterwards with the more good-will, because
you would perceive that there is neither severity nor moroseness in the
state of mind to which years and observation have brought me.... And now,
madam, God bless you. Farewell, and believe me to be your sincere friend,
Robert Southey.” It was during a visit to the Lakes that Charlotte
Brontë told her biographer of these letters. But Southey lay at rest in
Crosthwaite churchyard.

“My days among the dead are past”—Southey wrote, but it is evident
that the living, and not those of his own household alone, claimed no
inconsiderable portion of his time. Indeed, it would not be untrue to
assert that few men have been more genuinely and consistently social,
that few men ever yielded themselves more constantly to the pleasures of
companionship. But the society he loved best was that of old and chosen
friends, or if new friends, one at a time, and only one. Next to romping
with my children, he said, I enjoy a _tête-à-tête_ conversation with
an _old_ friend or a _new_. “With one I can talk of familiar subjects
which we have discussed in former years, and with the other, if he have
any brains, I open what to me is a new mine of thought.” Miscellaneous
company to a certain extent disordered and intoxicated him. He felt no
temptation to say a great deal, but he would often say things strongly
and emphatically, which were better left unsaid. “In my hearty hatred of
assentation I commit faults of the opposite kind. Now I am sure to find
this out myself, and to get out of humour with myself; what prudence I
have is not ready on demand; and so it is that the society of any except
my friends, though it may be sweet in the mouth, is bitter in the belly.”
When Coleridge, in their arguments, allowed him a word, Southey made up
in weight for what was wanting in measure; he saw one fact quickly, and
darted at it like a greyhound. De Quincey has described his conversation
as less flowing and expansive than that of Wordsworth—more apt to clothe
itself in a keen, sparkling, aphoristic form; consequently sooner coming
to an abrupt close; “the style of his mind naturally prompts him to adopt
a trenchant, pungent, aculeated form of terse, glittering, stenographic
sentences—sayings which have the air of laying down the law without any
_locus penitentiæ_ or privilege of appeal, but are not meant to do so.”
The same manner, tempered and chastened by years, can be recognized in
the picture of Southey drawn by his friend Sir Henry Taylor:—

“The characteristics of his manner, as of his appearance,
were lightness and strength, an easy and happy composure as
the accustomed mood, and much mobility at the same time, so
that he could be readily excited into any degree of animation
in discourse, speaking, if the subject moved him much, with
extraordinary fire and force, though always in light, laconic
sentences. When so moved, the fingers of his right hand
often rested against his mouth and quivered through nervous
susceptibility. But excitable as he was in conversation, he
was never angry or irritable; nor can there be any greater
mistake concerning him than that into which some persons have
fallen when they have inferred, from the fiery vehemence with
which he could give utterance to moral anger in verse or prose,
that he was personally ill-tempered or irascible. He was, in
truth, a man whom it was hardly possible to quarrel with or
offend personally, and face to face.... He was averse from
argumentation, and would commonly quit a subject, when it
was passing into that shape, with a quiet and good-humoured
indication of the view in which he rested. He talked most,
and with most interest, about books and about public affairs;
less, indeed hardly at all, about the characters and qualities
of men in private life, In the society of strangers or of
acquaintances, he seemed to take more interest in the subjects
spoken of than in the persons present, his manner being that of
natural courtesy and general benevolence without distinction of
individuals. Had there been some tincture of social vanity in
him, perhaps he would have been brought into closer relations
with those whom he met in society; but though invariably kind
and careful of their feelings, he was indifferent to the
manner in which they regarded him, or (as the phrase is) to
his _effect_ in society; and they might, perhaps, be conscious
that the kindness they received was what flowed naturally and
inevitably to all, that they had nothing to give in return
which was of value to him, and that no individual relations
were established.”

How deep and rich Southey’s social nature was, his published
correspondence, some four or five thousand printed pages, tells
sufficiently. These letters, addressed, for the most part, to good old
friends, are indeed genial, liberal of sympathy, and expecting sympathy
in return; pleasantly egotistic, grave, playful, wise, pathetic, with
a kind of stringent pathos showing through checks imposed by the wiser
and stronger will. Southey did not squander abroad the treasures of his
affection. To lavish upon casual acquaintance the outward and visible
signs of friendship seemed to him a profaning of the mystery of manly
love. “Your feelings,” he writes to Coleridge, “go naked; I cover mine
with a bear-skin; I will not say that you harden yours by your mode, but
I am sure that mine are the warmer for their clothing.” With strangers a
certain neutral courtesy served to protect his inner self like the low
leaves of his own holly-tree:

“Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seen
Wrinkled and keen;
No grazing cattle through their prickly round
Can reach to wound;”

but to those of whose goodness and love he was well assured, there were
no protecting spines:

“Gentle at home amid my friends I’d be,
Like the high leaves upon the Holly-tree.”

“Old friends and old books,” he says, “are the best things that this
world affords (I like old wine also), and in these I am richer than
most men (the wine excepted).” In the group of Southey’s friends, what
first strikes one is, not that they are men of genius—although the group
includes Wordsworth, and Scott, and Henry Taylor—but that they are good
men. No one believed more thoroughly than Southey that goodness is a
better thing than genius; yet he required in his associates some high
excellence, extraordinary kindness of disposition or strength of moral
character, if not extraordinary intellect. To knit his friends in a
circle was his ardent desire; in the strength of his affections time
and distance made no change. An old College friend, Lightfoot, to visit
Southey, made the longest journey of his life; it was eight-and-twenty
years since they had met. When their hands touched, Lightfoot trembled
like an aspen-leaf. “I believe,” says Southey, “no men ever met more
cordially after so long a separation, or enjoyed each other’s society
more. I shall never forget the manner in which he first met me, nor
the tone in which he said ‘that, having now seen me, he should return
home and die in peace.’” But of all friends he was most at ease with
his dear Dapple, Grosvenor Bedford, who suited for every mood of mirth
and sorrow. When Mrs. Southey had fallen into her sad decay, and the
once joyous house was melancholy and silent, Southey turned for comfort
to Bedford. Still, some of their Rabelaisian humour remained, and all
their warmth of brotherly affection. “My father,” says Cuthbert Southey,
“was never tired of talking into Mr. Bedford’s trumpet.” And in more
joyous days, what noise and nonsense did they not make! “Oh! Grosvenor,”
exclaims Southey, “is it not a pity that two men who love nonsense so
cordially and naturally and _bonâfidically_ as you and I, should be three
hundred miles asunder? For my part, I insist upon it that there is no
sense so good as your honest, genuine nonsense.”

A goodly company of friends becomes familiar to us as we read Southey’s
correspondence:—Wynn, wherever he was, “always doing something else,” yet
able, in the midst of politics and business, to find time to serve an
old schoolfellow; Rickman, full of practical suggestions, and accurate
knowledge and robust benevolence; John May, unfailing in kindness and
fidelity; Lamb for play and pathos, and subtle criticism glancing amid
the puns; William Taylor for culture and literary theory, and paradox and
polysyllables; Landor for generous admiration, and kindred enthusiasms
and kindred prejudices; Elmsley, and Lightfoot, and Danvers for love and
happy memories; Senhora Barker, the Bhow Begum, for frank familiarities,
and warm, womanly services; Caroline Bowles for rarer sympathy and
sacreder hopes and fears; Henry Taylor for spiritual sonship, as of a
son who is also an equal; and Grosvenor Bedford for everything great and
small, glad and sad, wise and foolish.

No literary rivalries or jealousies ever interrupted for a moment any
friendship of Southey. Political and religious differences, which
in strangers were causes of grave offence, seemed to melt away when
the heretic or erring statist was a friend. But if success, fashion,
flattery, tested a man, and proved him wanting, as seemed to be the case
with Humphry Davy, his affection grew cold; and an habitual dereliction
of social duty, such as that of Coleridge, could not but transform
Southey’s feeling of love to one of condemning sorrow. To his great
contemporaries, Scott, Landor, Wordsworth, his admiration was freely
given. “Scott,” he writes, “is very ill. He suffers dreadfully, but
bears his sufferings with admirable equanimity.... God grant that he may
recover! He is a noble and generous-hearted creature, whose like we shall
not look upon again.” Of Wordsworth:—“A greater poet than Wordsworth
there never has been, nor ever will be.” “Two or three generations
must pass before the public affect to admire such poets as Milton and
Wordsworth. Of such men the world scarcely produces one in a millennium.”
With indignation crossed by a gleam of humour, he learnt that Ebenezer
Elliott, his pupil in the art of verse, had stepped forward as the lyrist
of radicalism; but the feeling could not be altogether anger with which
he remembered that earnest face, once seen by him at a Sheffield inn,
its pale grey eyes full of fire and meaning, its expression suiting well
with Elliott’s frankness of manner and simplicity of character. William
Taylor was one of the liberals of liberal Norwich, and dangled abroad
whatever happened to be the newest paradox in religion. But neither
his radicalism, nor his Pyrrhonism, nor his paradoxes, could estrange
Southey. The last time the oddly-assorted pair met was in Taylor’s house;
the student of German criticism had found some theological novelty, and
wished to draw his guest into argument; Southey parried the thrusts
good-humouredly, and at last put an end to them with the words, “Taylor,
come and see me at Keswick. We will ascend Skiddaw, where I shall have
you nearer heaven, and we will then discuss such questions as these.”

In the year 1823 one of his oldest friends made a public attack on
Southey, and that friend the gentlest and sweetest-natured of them all.
In a _Quarterly_ article Southey had spoken of the Essays of Elia as a
book which wanted only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful
as it was original. He had intended to alter the expression in the
proof-sheet, but no proof-sheet was ever sent. Lamb, already pained
by references to his writings in the _Quarterly_, some of which he
erroneously ascribed to Southey, was deeply wounded. “He might have
spared an old friend such a construction of a few careless flights that
meant no harm to religion.” A long expostulation addressed by Elia to
Robert Southey, Esq., appeared in the _London Magazine_ for October, only
a portion of which is retained in the Elia Essays under the title of “The
Tombs of the Abbey;” for though Lamb had playfully repented Coleridge’s
salutation, “my gentle-hearted Charles,” his heart was indeed gentle,
and could not endure the pain of its own wrath; among the memorials of
the dead in Westminster he finds his right mind, his truer self, once
more; he forgets the grave aspect with which Southey looked awful on his
poor friend, and spends his indignation harmless as summer lightning
over the heads of a Dean and Chapter. Southey, seeing the announcement
of letter addressed to him by Lamb, had expected a sheaf of friendly
pleasantries; with surprise he learnt what pain his words had caused.
He hastened to explain; had Lamb intimated his feelings in private, he
would have tried, by a passage in the ensuing _Quarterly_, to efface the
impression unhappily created; he ended with a declaration of unchanged
affection, and a proposal to call on Lamb. “On my part,” Southey said,
“there was not even a momentary feeling of anger;” he at once understood
the love, the error, the soreness, and the repentance awaiting a being so
composed of goodness as Elia. “Dear Southey”—runs the answer of Lamb—“the
kindness of your note has melted away the mist that was upon me. I have
been fighting against a shadow.... I wish both magazine and review were
at the bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed to see you, and my sister
(though innocent) will be still more so, for this folly was done without
her knowledge, and has made her uneasy ever since. My guardian angel
was absent at the time. I will make up courage to see you, however, any
day next week. We shall hope that you will bring Edith with you. That
will be a second mortification; she will hate to see us; but come and
heap embers; we deserve it, I for what I have done, and she for being
my sister. Do come early in the day, by sunlight that you may see my
Milton.... Your penitent C. Lamb.”

At Bristol, in 1808, Southey met for the first time the man of all others
whom he most desired to see, the only man living, he says, “of whose
praise I was ambitious, of whose censure would have humbled me.” This
was Walter Savage Landor. _Madoc_, on which Southey had build his hope
of renown as a poet, had been published, and had been coldly received;
_Kehama_, which had been begun consequently now stood still. Their
author could indeed, as he told Sir George Beaumont, be contented with
posthumous fame, but it was impossible to be contented with posthumous
bread and cheese. “St. Cecilia herself could not have played the organ
if there had been nobody to blow the bellows for her.” At this moment,
when he turned sadly and bravely from poetry to more profitable work,
he first looked on Landor. “I never saw any one more unlike myself,”
he writes, “in every prominent part of human character, nor any one
who so cordially and instinctively agreed with me on so many of the
most important subjects. I have often said before we met, that I would
walk forty miles to see him, and having seen him, I would gladly walk
fourscore to see him again. He talked of _Thalaba_, and I told him of
the series of mythological poems which I had planned, ... and also told
him for what reason they had been laid aside; in plain English, that I
could not afford to write them. Landor’s reply was, ‘Go on with them,
and I will pay for printing them, as many as you will write, and as
many copies as you please.’” The princely offer stung Southey, as he
says, to the very core; not that he thought of accepting that offer,
but the generous words were themselves a deed, and claimed a return. He
rose earlier each morning to carry on his _Kehama_, without abstracting
time from better-paid task-work; it advanced, and duly as each section
of this poem, and subsequently of his _Roderick_, came to be written,
it was transcribed for the friend whose sympathy and admiration were a
golden reward. To be praised by one’s peers is indeed happiness. Landor,
liberal of applause, was keen in suggestion and exact in censure. Both
friends were men of ardent feelings, though one had tamed himself,
while the other never could be tamed; both often gave their feelings a
vehement utterance. On many matters they thought, in the main, alike—on
the grand style in human conduct, on the principles of the poetic art,
on Spanish affairs, on Catholicism. The secret of Landor’s high-poised
dignity in verse had been discovered by Southey; he, like Landor,
aimed at a classical purity of diction; he, like Landor, loved, as a
shaper of imaginative forms, to embody in an act, or an incident, the
virtue of some eminent moment of human passion, and to give it fixity
by sculptured phrase; only the repression of a fiery spirit is more
apparent in Landor’s monumental lines than in Southey’s. With certain
organic resemblances, and much community of sentiment, there were large
differences between the two, so that when they were drawn together in
sympathy, each felt as if he had annexed a new province. Landor rejoiced
that the first persons who shared his turret at Llanthony were Southey
and his wife; again, in 1817, the two friends were together for three
days at Como, after Southey had endured his prime affliction—the death of
his son:—

“Grief had swept over him; days darkened round;
Bellagio, Valintelvi smiled in vain,
And Monte Rosa from Helvetia far
Advanced to meet us, wild in majesty
Above the glittering crests of giant sons
Station’d around ... in vain too! all in vain.”

Two years later the warm-hearted friend writes from Pistoia, rejoicing
in Southey’s joy: “Thank God! Tears came into my eyes on seeing that you
were blessed with a son.” To watch the happiness of children was Landor’s
highest delight; to share in such happiness was Southey’s; and Arnold
and Cuthbert formed a new bond between their fathers. In 1836, when
Southey, in his sixty-third year, guided his son through the scenes of
his boyhood, several delightful days were spent at Clifton with Landor.
I never knew a man of brighter genius or of kinder heart, said Southey;
and of Landor in earlier years:—“He does more than any of the gods of all
my mythologies, for his very words are thunder and lightning—such is the
power and splendour with which they burst out.” Landor responded with a
majestic enthusiasm about his friend, who seemed to him no less noble a
man than admirable a writer:

“No firmer breast than thine hath Heaven
To poet, sage, or hero given:
No heart more tender, none more just,
To that He largely placed in trust:
Therefore shalt thou, whatever date
Of years be thine, with soul elate
Rise up before the Eternal throne,
And hear, in God’s own voice, ‘Well done!’”

That “Well done” greeted Southey many years before Landor’s imperial
head was laid low. In the last letter from his friend received by
Southey—already the darkness was fast closing in—he writes, “If any man
living is ardent for your welfare, I am; whose few and almost worthless
merits your generous heart has always overvalued, and whose infinite
and great faults it has been too ready to overlook. I will write to you
often, now I learn that I may do it inoffensively; well remembering that
among the names you have exalted is Walter Landor.” Alas! to reply was
now beyond the power of Southey; still, he held _Gebir_ in his hands
oftener than any other volume of poetry, and, while thought and feeling
lived, fed upon its beauty. “It is very seldom now,” Caroline Southey
wrote at a later date, “that he ever names any person: but this morning,
before he left his bed, I heard him repeating softly to himself, _Landor,
ay, Landor_.”

“If it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all”—this was ever
present to Southey during the happy days of labour and rest in Greta
Hall. While he was disposing his books so as to make the comeliest show,
and delighting in their goodly ranks; while he looked into the radiant
faces of his children, and loved their innocent brightness, he yet knew
that the day of detachment was approaching. There was nothing in such a
thought which stirred Southey to a rebellious mood; had he not set his
seal to the bond of life? How his heart rested in his home, only his
own words can tell; even a journey to London seemed too long:—“Oh dear;
oh dear! there is such a comfort in one’s old coat and old shoes, one’s
own chair and own fireside, one’s own writing-desk and own library—with
a little girl climbing up to my neck, and saying, ‘Don’t go to London,
papa—you must stay with Edith;’ and a little boy, whom I have taught to
speak the language of cats, dogs, cuckoos, and jackasses, etc., before he
can articulate a word of his own;—there is such a comfort in all these
things, that _transportation_ to London for four or five weeks seems a
heavier punishment than any sins of mine deserve.” Nor did his spirit of
boyish merriment abate until overwhelming sorrow weighed him down:—“I
am quite as noisy as I ever was,” he writes to Lightfoot, “and should
take as much delight as ever in showering stones through the hole of
the staircase against your room door, and hearing with what hearty good
earnest ‘you fool’ was vociferated in indignation against me in return.
Oh, dear Lightfoot, what a blessing it is to have a boy’s heart! it
is as great a blessing in carrying one through this world, as to have
a child’s spirit will be in fitting us for the next.” But Southey’s
light-heartedness was rounded by a circle of earnest acquiescence in
the law of mortal life; a clear-obscure of faith as pure and calm and
grave as the heavens of a midsummer night. At thirty he writes:—“No
man was ever more contented with his lot than I am, for few have ever
had more enjoyments, and none had ever better or worthier hopes. Life,
therefore, is sufficiently dear to me, and long life desirable, that I
may accomplish all which I design. But yet I could be well content that
the next century were over, and my part fairly at an end, having been
gone well through. Just as at school one wished the school-days over,
though we were happy enough there, because we expected more happiness and
more liberty when we were to be our own masters, might lie as much later
in the morning as we pleased, have no bounds and do no exercise—just so
do I wish that my exercises were over.” At thirty-five:—“Almost the only
wish I ever give utterance to is that the next hundred years were over.
It is not that the uses of this world seem to me weary, stale, flat, and
unprofitable—God knows far otherwise! No man can be better contented with
his lot. My paths are paths of pleasantness.... Still, the instability of
human happiness is ever before my eyes; I long for the certain and the
permanent.” “My notions about life are much the same as they are about
travelling—there is a good deal of amusement on the road, but, after
all, one wants to be at rest.” At forty:—“My disposition is invincibly
cheerful, and this alone would make me a cheerful man if I were not so
from the tenor of my life; yet I doubt whether the strictest Carthusian
has the thought of death more habitually in his mind.”

Such was Southey’s constant temper: to some persons it may seem an
unfortunate one; to some it may be practically unintelligible. But
those who accept of the feast of life freely, who enter with a bounding
foot its measures of beauty and of joy—glad to feel all the while
the serviceable sackcloth next the skin—will recognize in Southey an
instructed brother of the Renunciauts’ rule.

CHAPTER VI.

CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803-1843.

In October, 1805, Southey started with his friend Elmsley for a short
tour in Scotland. On their way northward they stopped three days at
Ashestiel. There, in a small house, rising amid its old-fashioned garden,
with pastoral hills all around, and the Tweed winding at the meadow’s
end, lived Walter Scott. It was the year in which old Border song had
waked up, with ampler echoings, in the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, and
Scott was already famous. Earlier in the year he had visited Grasmere,
and had stood upon the summit of Helvellyn, with Wordsworth and Davy by
his side. The three October days, with their still, misty brightness,
went by in full enjoyment. Southey had brought with him a manuscript
containing sundry metrical romances of the fifteenth century, on which
his host pored, as far as courtesy and the hours allowed, with much
delight; and the guests saw Melrose, that old romance in stone so dear
to Scott, went salmon-spearing on the Tweed, dined on a hare snapped
up before their eyes by Percy and Douglas, and visited Yarrow. From
Ashestiel they proceeded to Edinburgh. Southey looked coldly on the grey
metropolis; its new city seemed a kind of Puritan Bath, which worshipped
propriety instead of pleasure; but the old town, seen amid the slant
light of a wild red sunset, impressed him much, its vast irregular
outline of roofs and chimneys rising against tumultuous clouds like the
dismantled fragments of a giant’s palace. Southey was prepared to find
himself and his friends of the Lakes persons of higher stature than
the Scotch _literatuli_. Before accepting an invitation to meet him at
supper, Jeffrey politely forwarded the proof of an unpublished review
of _Madoc_; if the poet preferred that his reviewer should not present
himself, Mr. Jeffrey would deny himself the pleasure of Mr. Southey’s
acquaintance. Southey was not to be daunted, and, as he tells it himself,
felt nothing but good-humour on beholding a bright-faced homunculus of
five-foot-one, the centre of an attentive circle, ëënunciating with
North-British ëëlocution his doctrines on taste. The lively little
gentleman, who thought to crush _The Excursion_—he could as easily crush
Skiddaw, said Southey—received from the author of _Madoc_ a courtesy _de
haut en bas_ intended to bring home to his consciousness the fact that he
was—but five-foot-one. The bland lips of the gods who looked down on Auld
Reekie that evening smiled at the magnanimity alike of poet and critic.

Two years later (1807), differences having arisen between the proprietors
and the editor of the _Edinburgh Review_, it was in contemplation to
alter the management, and Longman wrote requesting Southey to review
him two or three articles “in his best manner.” Southey did not keep
firkins of criticism of first and second brand, but he was not unwilling
to receive ten guineas a sheet instead of seven pounds. When, however,
six months later, Scott urged his friend to contribute, Judge Jeffrey
still sat on the bench of the _Edinburgh Review_, hanging, drawing, and
quartering luckless poets with undiminished vivacity. It was of no use
for Scott to assure Southey that the homunculus, notwithstanding his
flippant attacks on _Madoc_ and _Thalaba_, had the most sincere respect
for their author and his talents. Setting all personal feelings aside, an
irreconcilable difference, Southey declared, between Jeffrey and himself
upon every great principle of taste, morality, and policy, occasioned a
difficulty which could not be removed. Within less than twelve months
Scott, alienated by the deepening Whiggery of the _Review_, and by more
personal causes, had ceased to contribute, and opposite his name in
the list of subscribers Constable had written, with indignant notes of
exclamation, “_Stopt!!!_” John Murray, the young bookseller in Fleet
Street, had been to Ashestiel; in “dern privacie” a bold complot was
laid; why should the Edinburgh clique carry it before them? The spirit of
England was still sound, and would respond to loyalty, patriotism, the
good traditions of Church and State, the temper of gentlemen, courage,
scholarship; Gifford, of the Anti-Jacobin, had surely a sturdier arm than
Jeffrey; George Ellis would remember his swashing-blow; there were the
Roses, and Matthias, and Heber; a rival _Review_ should see the light,
and that speedily; “a good plot, good friends, and full of expectation—an
excellent plot, very good friends.”

Southey was invited to write on Spanish affairs for the first number of
the _Quarterly_ (February, 1809). His political opinions had undergone
a considerable alteration since the days of Pantisocracy and _Joan of
Arc_. The Reign of Terror had not caused a violent reaction against
the doctrine of a Republic, nor did he soon cease to sympathize with
France. But his hopes were dashed; it was plain that “the millennium
would not come this bout.” Man as he is appeared more greedy, ignorant,
and dangerous than he had appeared before, though man as he may be was
still a being composed of knowledge, virtue, and love. The ideal republic
receded into the dimness of unborn time; no doubt—so Southey maintained
to the end—a republic is the best form of government in itself, as a
sundial is simpler and surer than a time-piece; but the sun of reason
does not always shine, and therefore complicated systems of government,
containing checks and counter-checks, are needful in old countries for
the present; better systems are no doubt conceivable—for better men.
“Mr. Southey’s mind,” wrote Hazlitt, “is essentially sanguine, even to
overweeningness. It is prophetic of good; it cordially embraces it; it
casts a longing, lingering look after it, even when it is gone for ever.
He cannot bear to give up the thought of happiness, his confidence in his
fellow-men, when all else despair. It is the very element where he must
live or have no life at all.’” This is true; we sacrifice too much to
prudence—Southey said, when not far from sixty—and in fear of incurring
the danger or the reproach of enthusiasm, too often we stifle the holiest
impulses of the understanding and the heart. Still, at sixty he believed
in a state of society actually to be realized as superior to English
society in the nineteenth century, as that itself is superior to the
condition of the tattooed Britons, or of the Northern Pirates from whom
we have descended. But the error of supposing such a state of society
too near, of fancying that there is a short road to it, seemed to him a
pernicious error, seducing the young and generous into an alliance with
whatever is flagitious and detestable.

It was not until the Peace of Amiens (1802) that Southey was restored
in feeling to his own country. From that hour the new departure in his
politics may be said to date. The honour of England became as dear to
him as to her most patriotic son; and in the man who had subjugated
the Swiss Republic, and thrown into a dungeon the champion of Negro
independence, and slaughtered his prisoners at Jaffa, he indignantly
refused to recognize the representative of the generous principles of
1789. To him, as to Wordsworth, the very life of virtue in mankind seemed
to dwell in the struggle against the military despotism which threatened
to overwhelm the whole civilized world. Whatever went along with a
spirited war-policy Southey could accept. It appeared to himself that his
views and hopes had changed precisely because the heart and soul of his
wishes had continued the same. To remove the obstacles which retard the
improvement of mankind was the one object to which, first and last, he
gave his most earnest vows. “This has been the pole-star of my course;
the needle has shifted according to the movements of the state vessel
wherein I am embarked, but the direction to which it points has always
been the same. I did not fall into the error of those who, having been
the friends of France when they imagined that the cause of liberty was
implicated in her success, transferred their attachment from the Republic
to the Military Tyranny in which it ended, and regarded with complacency
the progress of oppression because France was the oppressor. ‘They had
turned their face toward the East in the morning to worship the rising
sun, and in the evening they were looking eastward, obstinately affirming
that still the sun was there.’ I, on the contrary altered my position as
the world went round.”[9]

Wordsworth has described in memorable words the sudden exaltation of
the spirit of resistance to Napoleon, its change from the temper of
fortitude to enthusiasm, animated by hope, when the Spanish people
rose against their oppressors. “From that moment,” he says, “this
corruptible put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality.”
Southey had learned to love the people of the Peninsula; he had almost
naturalized himself among them by his studies of Spanish and Portuguese
history and literature. Now there was in him a new birth of passion at
a period of life when ordinarily the crust of custom begins to encase
our free spirits. All his moral ardour flowed in the same current with
his political enthusiasm; in this war there was as direct a contest
between the principles of evil and good as the elder Persians or the
Manicheans imagined in their fables. “Since the stirring day of the
French Revolution,” he writes to John May, “I have never felt half so
much excitement in political events as the present state of Spain has
given me.” Little as he liked to leave home, if the Spaniards would
bury their crown and sceptre, he would gird up his loins and assist at
the ceremony, devout as ever pilgrim at Compostella. A federal republic
which should unite the Peninsula, and allow the internal governments to
remain distinct, was what Southey ardently desired. When news came of the
Convention of Cintra (1808), the poet, ordinarily so punctual a sleeper,
lay awake all night; since the execution of the Brissotines no public
event distressed him so deeply. “How gravely and earnestly used Samuel
Taylor Coleridge”—so writes Coleridge’s daughter—“and William Wordsworth
and my uncle Southey also, to discuss the affairs of the nation, as if it
all came home to their business and bosoms, as if it were their private
concern! Men do not canvass these matters now-a-days, I think, quite in
the same tone.”

That faith in the ultimate triumph of good which sustains Southey’s
heroine against the persecution of the Almighty Rajah, sustained
Southey himself during the long struggle with Napoleon. A military
despotism youthful and full of vigour, he said, must beat down corrupt
establishments and worn-out governments; but how can it beat down for
ever a true love of liberty and a true spirit of patriotism? When at last
tidings reached Keswick that the Allies were in Paris, Southey’s feelings
were such as he had never experienced before. “The curtain had fallen
after a tragedy of five-and-twenty years.” The hopes, and the ardours,
and the errors, and the struggles of his early life crowded upon his
mind; all things seemed to have worked together for good. He rejoiced
that the whirlwind of revolution had cleared away the pestilence of the
old governments; he rejoiced that right had conquered might. He did not
wish to see the bad Bourbon race restored, except to complete Bonaparte’s
overthrow. And he feared lest an evil peace should be made. Paris taken,
a commanding intellect might have cast Europe into whatever mould it
pleased. “The first business,” says Southey, with remarkable prevision,
“should have been to have reduced France to what she was before Louis
XIV.’s time; the second, to have created a great power in the North of
Germany, with Prussia at its head; the third, to have consolidated Italy
into one kingdom or commonwealth.”

The politicians of the _Edinburgh Review_ had predicted ruin for all who
dared to oppose the Corsican; they ridiculed the romantic hopes of the
English nation; the fate of Spain, they declared in 1810, was decided;
it would be cruel, they said, to foment petty insurrections; France had
conquered Europe. It was this policy of despair which roused Scott and
Southey. “We shall hoist the bloody flag,” writes the latter, “down
alongside that Scotch ship, and engage her yard-arm to yard-arm.” But
at first Southey, by his own request, was put upon other work than that
of firing off the heavy _Quarterly_ guns. Probably no man in England
had read so many books of travel; these he could review better, he
believed, than anything else; biography and history were also within
his reach; with English poetry, from Spenser onwards, his acquaintance
was wide and minute, but he took no pleasure in sitting in judgment on
his contemporaries; his knowledge of the literary history of Spain and
Portugal was a speciality, which, as often as the readers of the _Review_
could bear with it, might be brought into use. Two things he could
promise without fail—perfect sincerity in what he might write, without
the slightest pretension of knowledge which he did not possess, and a
punctuality not to be exceeded by Mr. Murray’s opposite neighbour, the
clock of St. Dunstan’s.

Southey’s essays—literary, biographical, historical, and
miscellaneous—would probably now exist in a collected form, and
constitute a store-house of information—information often obtained
with difficulty, and always conveyed in a lucid and happy style—were
it not that he chose, on the eve of the Reform Bill, to earn whatever
unpopularity he could by collecting his essays on political and social
subjects. Affairs had hurried forward with eager strides; these
_Quarterly_ articles seemed already far behind, and might safely be left
to take a quiet corner in Time’s wallet among the alms for oblivion.
Yet Southey’s political articles had been effective in their day, and
have still a value by no means wholly antiquarian. His home politics had
been, in the main, determined by his convictions on the great European
questions. There was a party of revolution in this country eager to
break with the past, ready to venture every experiment for a future
of mere surmise. Southey believed that the moral sense of the English
people, their regard for conduct, would do much to preserve them from
lawless excess; still, the lesson read by recent history was that order
once overthrown, anarchy follows, to be itself quelled by the lordship
of the sword. Rights, however, were pleaded—shall we refuse to any man
the rights of a man? “Therapeutics,” says Southey, “were in a miserable
state as long as practitioners proceeded upon the gratuitous theory of
elementary complexions; ... natural philosophy was no better, being a
mere farrago of romance, founded upon idle tales or fanciful conjectures,
not upon observation and experiment. The science of politics is just
now in the same stage; it has been erected by shallow sophists upon
abstract rights and imaginary compacts, without the slightest reference
to habits and history.” “Order and improvement” were the words inscribed
on Southey’s banner. Order, that England might not fall, as France had
fallen, into the hands of a military saviour of society; order, that she
might be in a condition to wage her great feud on behalf of freedom with
undivided energy. Order, therefore, first; not by repression alone—though
there were a time and a place for repression also—but order with
improvement as a portion of its very life and being. Southey was a poet
and a moralist, and judged of the well-being of a people by other than
material standards; the wealth of nations seemed to him something other
and higher than can be ascertained by wages and prices, rent and revenue,
exports and imports. “True it is,” he writes, “the ground is more highly
cultivated, the crooked hedge-rows have been thrown down, the fields are
in better shape and of handsomer dimensions, the plough makes longer
furrows, there is more corn and fewer weeds; but look at the noblest
produce of the earth—look at the children of the soil, look at the seeds
which are sown here for immortality!” “The system which produces the
happiest moral effects will be found the most beneficial to the interest
of the individual and the general weal; upon this basis the science of
political economy will rest at last, when the ponderous volumes with
which it has been overlaid shall have sunk by their own weight into the
dead sea of oblivion.” Looking about him, he asked, What do the English
people chiefly need? More wealth? It may be so; but rather wisdom to use
the wealth they have. More votes? Yes, hereafter; but first the light of
knowledge, that men may see how to use a vote. Even the visible beauty
and grace of life seemed to Southey a precious thing, the loss of which
might be set over against some gain in pounds, shillings, and pence. The
bleak walls and barrack-like windows of a manufactory, the long, unlovely
row of operatives’ dwellings, struck a chill into his heart. He contrasts
the old cottages substantially built of native stone, mellowed by time,
taken by nature to herself with a mother’s fondness, the rose-bushes
beside the door, the little patch of flower-garden—he contrasts these
with the bald deformities in which the hands of a great mill are stalled.

Before all else, national education appeared to Southey to be the need
of England. He saw a great population growing up with eager appetites,
and consciousness of augmented power. Whence were moral thoughtfulness
and self-restraint to come? Not, surely, from the triumph of liberal
opinions; not from the power to read every incentive to vice and
sedition; nor from Religious Tract societies; nor from the portentous
bibliolatry of the Evangelical party. But there is an education which
at once enlightens the understanding and trains the conscience and
the will. And there is that great association for making men good—the
Church of England. Connect the two—education and the Church; the progress
of enlightenment, virtue, and piety, however gradual, will be sure.
Subordinate to this primary measure of reform, national education, many
other measures were advocated by Southey. He looked forward to a time
when, the great struggle respecting property over—for this struggle he
saw looming not far off—public opinion will no more tolerate the extreme
of poverty in a large class of the people than it now tolerates slavery
in Europe; when the aggregation of land in the hands of great owners must
cease, when that community of lands, which Owen of Lanark would too soon
anticipate, might actually be realized. But these things were, perhaps,
far off. Meanwhile how to bring nearer the golden age? Southey’s son
has made out a long list of the measures urged upon the English people
in the _Quarterly Review_, or elsewhere, by his father. Bearing in mind
that the proposer of these measures resisted the Reform Bill, Free Trade,
and Catholic Emancipation, any one curious in such things may determine
with what political label he should be designated:—National education;
the diffusion of cheap and good literature; a well-organized system
of colonization, and especially of female emigration;[10] a wholesome
training for the children of misery and vice in great cities; the
establishment of Protestant sisters of charity, and a better order of
hospital nurses; the establishment of savings-banks in all small towns;
the abolition of flogging in the army and navy, except in extreme cases;
improvements in the poor-laws; alterations in the game-laws; alterations
in the criminal laws, as inflicting the punishment of death in far too
many cases; execution of criminals within prison walls; alterations in
the factory system for the benefit of the operative, and especially as to
the employment of children; national works—reproductive if possible—to
be undertaken in times of peculiar distress; the necessity of doing
away with interments in crowded cities; the system of giving allotments
of ground to labourers; the employment of paupers in cultivating waste
lands; the commutation of tithes; and last, the need for more clergymen,
more colleges, more courts of law.

“Mr. Southey,” said Hazlitt, “missed his way in Utopia; he has found it
at old Sarum.” To one of Southey’s temper old Sarum seemed good, with
its ordered freedom, its serious aspiration, its habitual pieties, its
reasonable service, its reverent history, its beauty of holiness, its
close where priests who are husbands and fathers live out their calm,
benignant lives—its amiable home for those whose toil is ended, and who
now sleep well. But how Southey found his way from his early deism to
Anglican orthodoxy cannot be precisely determined. Certainly not for
many years could he have made that subscription to the Articles of the
Church of England, which at the first barred his way to taking orders.
The superstition, which seemed to be the chief spiritual food of Spain,
had left Southey, for the rest of his life, a resolute opponent of
Catholicism; and as he read lives of the Saints and histories of the
Orders, the exclamation, “I do well to be angry,” was often on his lips.
For the wisdom, learning, and devotion of the Jesuits he had, however,
a just respect. Geneva, with its grim logic and stark spirituality,
suited nerves of a different temper from his. For a time Southey thought
himself half a Quaker, but he desired more visible beauty and more
historical charm than he could find in Quakerism. Needing a comely home
for his spiritual affections, he found precisely what pleased him built
in the pleasant Anglican close. With growing loyalty to the State, his
loyalty to the Church could not but keep pace. He loved her tolerance,
her culture; he fed upon her judicious and learned writers—Taylor, with
his bright fancies like the little rings of the vine; South, hitting out
straight from the shoulder at anarchy, fanaticism, and licentiousness,
as Southey himself would have liked to hit; Jackson, whose weight of
character made his pages precious as with golden bullion. After all, old
Sarum had some advantages over Utopia.

The English Constitution consisting of Church and State, it seemed to
Southey an absurdity in politics to give those persons power in the
State whose duty it is to subvert the Church. Admit Catholics, he said,
to every office of trust, emolument, or honour; only never admit them
into Parliament. “The arguments about equal rights are fit only for
a schoolboy’s declamation; it may as well be said that the Jew has
a right to be a bishop, or the Quaker an admiral, as that the Roman
Catholic has a right to a seat in the British Legislature; his opinions
disqualify him.” To call this a question of toleration was impudence;
Catholics were free to practise the rites of their religion; they had
the full and free use of the press; perfect toleration was granted to
the members of that church which, wherever dominant, tolerates no other.
Catholic Emancipation would not conciliate Ireland; the great source of
Irish misery had been, not England’s power, but her weakness, and those
violences to which weakness resorts in self-defence; old sores were not
to be healed by the admission of Catholic demagogues into Parliament.
The measure styled Emancipation would assuredly be followed by the
downfall of the Protestant Establishment in Ireland, and by the spread of
Catholicism in English society. To Pyrrhonists one form of faith might
seem as good or as bad as the other; but the great mass of the English
people had not advanced so far in the march of intellect as to perceive
no important difference between Catholic and Protestant doctrine, or
between Catholic and Protestant morality. By every possible means, better
the condition of the Irish peasantry; give them employment in public
works; facilitate, for those who desire it, the means of emigration;
extend the poor-laws to Ireland, and lay that impost on absentees in such
a proportion as may compensate, in some degree, for their non-residence;
educate the people; execute justice and maintain peace, and the cry of
Catholic Emancipation may be safely disregarded.

So Southey pleaded in the _Quarterly Review_. With reference to
Emancipation and to the Reform Bill, he and Wordsworth—who, perhaps,
had not kept themselves sufficiently in relation with living men and
the public sentiment of the day—were in their solitude gifted with a
measure of the prophetic spirit, which in some degree explains their
alarms. For the prophet who knows little of expediency and nothing of
the manipulation of parties, nothing of the tangled skein of contending
interests, sees the future in its moral causes, and he sees it in a
vision. But he cannot date the appearances in his vision. Battle, and
garments rolled in blood, and trouble, and dimness of anguish pass
before him, and he proclaims what it is given him to see. It matters not
a little, however, in the actual event, whether the battle be on the
morrow or half a century hence; and the prophet furnishes us with no
chronology, or at best with some vague time and times and half a time.
New forces have arisen before the terrors of his prediction come to pass,
and therefore, when they come to pass, their effect is often altogether
different from that anticipated. Wordsworth and Southey were right in
declaring that a vast and formidable change was taking place in the
England of their day: many things which they, amid incredulous scoffs,
announced, have become actual; others remain to be fulfilled. But the
events have taken up their place in an order of things foreign to the
conceptions of the prophets; the fire from heaven descends, but meanwhile
we, ingenious sons of men, have set up a lightning-conductor.

Southey and the _Quarterly Review_ were often spoken of as a single
entity. But the _Review_, in truth, never precisely represented his
feelings and convictions. With Gifford he had no literary sympathies.
Gifford’s heart was full of kindness, says Southey, for all living
creatures except authors; _them_ he regarded as Isaac Walton did the
worm. Against the indulgence of that temper Southey always protested;
yet he was chosen to bear the reproach of having tortured Keats, and of
having anonymously glorified himself at the expense of Shelley. Gifford’s
omissions, additions, substitutions, often caused Southey’s article in
the _Review_ to be very unlike the article which he had despatched to
the editor in manuscript. Probably these changes were often made on
warrantable grounds. Southey’s confidence in his own opinions, which
always seemed to him to be based upon moral principles, was high; and he
was not in the habit of diluting his ink. Phrases which sounded well in
the library of Greta Hall had quite another sound in Mr. Murray’s office
in Fleet Street.

On arriving in London for a short visit in the autumn of 1813, Southey
learnt that the Prince Regent wished to confer on him the Laureateship,
vacant by the death of Pye. Without consulting the Regent, Lord Liverpool
had previously directed that the office should be offered to Walter
Scott. On the moment came a letter from Scott informing Southey that he
had declined the appointment, not from any foolish prejudice against
holding it, but because he was already provided for, and would not
engross emoluments which ought to be awarded to a man of letters who had
no other views in life. Southey hesitated, having ceased for several
years to produce occasional verses; but his friend Croker assured him
that he would not be compelled to write odes as boys write exercises
at stated times on stated subjects; that it would suffice if he wrote
on great public events, or did not write, as the spirit moved him; and
thus his scruples were overcome. In a little, low, dark room in the
purlieus of St. James’—a solitary clerk being witness—the oath was duly
administered by a fat old gentleman-usher in full buckle, Robert Southey
swearing to be a faithful servant to the King, to reveal all treasons
which might come to his knowledge, and to obey the Lord Chamberlain
in all matters of the King’s service. It was Scott’s belief that his
generosity had provided for his poorer brother bard an income of three
or four hundred pounds a year. In reality the emolument was smaller and
the task-work more irksome than had been supposed. The tierce of Canary,
swilled by Ben Jonson and his poetic sons, had been wickedly commuted for
a small sum; the whole net income amounted to 90_l._ But this, “the very
least of Providence’s mercies,” as a poor clergyman said when pronouncing
grace over a herring, secured an important happiness for Southey: he did
not employ it, as Byron puts it, to butter his bread on both sides; he
added twelve pounds to it, and vested it forthwith in an insurance upon
his own life. “I have never felt any painful anxiety about providing for
my family, ...” he writes to Scott; “but it is with the deepest feeling
of thanksgiving that I have secured this legacy for my wife and children,
and it is to you that I am primarily and chiefly indebted.”

Croker’s assurance was too hastily given. The birthday Ode, indeed,
fell into abeyance during the long malady of George III.; but the
New-Year’s Ode had still to be provided. Southey was fortunate in 1814;
events worthy of celebration had taken place; a dithyramb, or rather an
oration in lines of irregular length, was accordingly produced, and was
forwarded to his musical yoke-fellow, Sir William Parsons. But the sight
of Southey’s page, over which the longs and shorts meandered seemingly
at their own sweet will, shocked the orderly mind of the chief musician.
What kind of ear could Mr. Southey have? His predecessor, the lamented
Mr. Pye, had written his Odes always in regular stanzas. What kind of
action was this exhibited by the unbroken State Pegasus? Duly as each
New Year approached, Southey set himself to what he called his _ode_ous
job; it was the price he paid for the future comfort of his children.
While his political assailants pictured the author of _Joan of Arc_ as
a court-lacquey following in the train of the fat Adonis, he, with grim
cheerfulness, was earning a provision for his girls; and had it not been
a duty to kiss hands on the appointment, His Royal Highness the Prince
Regent would never have seen his poet. Gradually the New-Year’s Ode
ceased to be looked for, and Southey was emancipated. His verse-making as
laureate occasionally rose into something higher than journeyman work;
when public events stirred his heart to joy, or grief, or indignation,
he wrote many admirable periods of measured rhetoric. _The Funeral Song
for the Princess Charlotte_ is of a higher strain; a knell, heavy yet
clear-toned, is tolled by its finely wrought octosyllabics.

A few months after the battle of Waterloo, which had so deeply moved
Southey, he started with his wife, a rare voyager from Keswick, and his
little daughter Edith May, on a pilgrimage to the scene of victory.
The aunts remained to take care of Bertha, Kate, and Isabel, with the
nine-years-old darling of all, the only boy, Herbert. With Bruges,
“like a city of Elizabeth’s age—you expect to see a head with a ruff
looking from the window,” Southey was beyond measure delighted. At Ghent
he ransacked bookshops, and was pleased to see in the Beguinage the
realization of his own and Rickman’s ideas on Sisterhoods. On a clear
September day the travellers visited the battlefield; the autumnal
sunshine with soft airs, and now and again a falling leaf, while the bees
were busy with the year’s last flowers, suited well with the poet’s mood
of thankfulness, tempered by solemn thought. When, early in December,
they returned with a lading of toys to their beloved lake-country, little
Edith had hardly recovered from an illness which had attacked her at Aix.
It was seven o’clock in the evening by the time they reached Rydal, and
to press forward and arrive while the children were asleep would be to
defraud everyone of the first reward earned by so long absence. “A return
home under fortunate circumstances has something of the character of a
triumph, and requires daylight.” The glorious presence of Skiddaw, and
Derwent bright under the winter sky, asked also for a greeting at noon
rather than at night. A depth of grave and tender thankfulness lay below
Southey’s joy that morning; it was twelve years since he had pitched his
tent here beside the Greta; twelve years had made him feel the touch of
time; but what blessings they had brought! all his heart’s desire was
here—books, children, leisure, and a peace that passeth understanding.
The instant hour, however, was not for meditation but for triumph:—

“O joyful hour, when to our longing home
The long-expected wheels at length drew nigh!
When the first sound went forth, ‘they come! they come!’
And hope’s impatience quicken’d every eye!
‘Never had man whom Heaven would heap with bliss
More glad return, more happy hour than this.’

“Aloft on yonder bench, with arms dispread,
My boy stood, shouting there his father’s name,
Waving his hat around his happy head;
And there a younger group his sisters came:
Smiling they stood with looks of pleased surprise
While tears of joy were seen in elder eyes.

“Soon all and each came crowding round to share
The cordial greeting, the beloved sight;
What welcomings of hand and lip were there!
And when those overflowings of delight
Subsided to a sense of quiet bliss,
Life hath no purer, deeper happiness.

“The young companion of our weary way
Found here the end desired of all her ills;
She who in sickness pining many a day
Hunger’d and thirsted for her native hills.
Forgetful now of suffering past and pain,
Rejoiced to see her own dear home again.

“Recovered now the homesick mountaineer
Sate by the playmate of her infancy,
The twin-like comrade,[11]—render’d doubly dear
For that long absence; full of life was she
With voluble discourse and eager mien
Telling of all the wonders she had seen.

“Here silently between her parents stood
My dark-eyed Bertha, timid as a dove;
And gently oft from time to time she woo’d
Pressure of hand, or word, or look of love,
With impulse shy of bashful tenderness,
Soliciting again the wished caress.

“The younger twain in wonder lost were they,
My gentle Kate and my sweet Isabel:
Long of our promised coming, day by day,
It had been their delight to hear and tell;
And now when that long-promised hour was come,
Surprise and wakening memory held them dumb.

...

“Soon they grew blithe as they were wont to be;
Her old endearments each began to seek;
And Isabel drew near to climb my knee,
And pat with fondling hand her father’s cheek;
With voice and touch and look reviving thus
The feelings which had slept in long disuse.

“But there stood one whose heart could entertain
And comprehend the fulness of the joy;
The father, teacher, playmate, was again
Come to his only and his studious boy;
And he beheld again that mother’s eye
Which with such ceaseless care had watched his infancy.

“Bring forth the treasures now—a proud display—
For rich as Eastern merchants we return!
Behold the black Beguine, the Sister grey,
The Friars whose heads with sober motion turn,
The Ark well filled with all its numerous hives,
Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japhet, and their wives.

“The tumbler loose of limb; the wrestlers twain;
And many a toy beside of quaint device,
Which, when his fleecy flocks no more can gain
Their pasture on the mountains hoar with ice,
The German shepherd carves with curious knife,
Earning in easy toil the food of frugal life.

“It was a group which Richter, had he viewed,
Might have deemed worthy of his perfect skill;
The keen impatience of the younger brood,
Their eager eyes and fingers never still;
The hope, the wonder, and the restless joy
Of those glad girls and that vociferous boy.

“The aged friend[12] serene with quiet smile,
Who in their pleasure finds her own delight;
The mother’s heart-felt happiness the while;
The aunt’s rejoicing in the joyful sight;
And he who in his gaiety of heart,
With glib and noisy tongue performed the showman’s part.”

It was manifest to a thoughtful observer, says De Quincey, that Southey’s
golden equanimity was bound up in a trinity of chords, a threefold
chain—in a conscience clear of offence, in the recurring enjoyments
from his honourable industry, and in the gratification of his parental
affections. In the light of Herbert’s smiles his father almost lived;
the very pulses of his heart played in unison with the sound of his
son’s laughter. “There was,” De Quincey goes on, “in his manner towards
this child, and towards this only, something that marked an excess of
delirious doating, perfectly unlike the ordinary chastened movement of
Southey’s affections; and something also which indicated a vague fear
about him; a premature unhappiness, as if already the inaudible tread of
calamity could be divined, as if already he had lost him.” As a baby,
while Edith was only “like an old book, ugly and good,” Herbert, in spite
of his Tartar eyes, a characteristic of Southey babyhood, was already
beautiful. At six he was more gentle and more loving, says Southey, than
you can almost conceive. “He has just learnt his Greek alphabet, and
is so desirous of learning, so attentive and so quick of apprehension,
that, if it please God he should live, there is little doubt but that
something will come out of him.” In April, 1809, Southey writes to
Landor, twenty-four hours after an attack of croup which seized his boy
had been subdued: “Even now I am far, very far, from being at ease. There
is a love which passeth the love of women, and which is more lightly
alarmed than the lightest jealousy. Landor, I am not a Stoic at home; I
feel as you do about the fall of an old tree! but, O Christ! what a pang
it is to look upon the young shoot and think it will be cut down! And
this is the thought which almost at all times haunts me; it comes upon me
in moments when I know not whether the tears that start are of love or of
bitterness.”

The alarm of 1809 passed away, and Herbert grew to the age of nine,
active and bright of spirit, yet too pale, and, like his father, hanging
too constantly over his books; a finely organized being, delicate in his
sensibilities, and prematurely accomplished. Before the snow had melted
which shone on Skiddaw that day when the children welcomed home their
parents, Herbert Southey lay in his grave. His disease was an affection
of the heart, and for weeks his father, palsied by apprehension, and
unable to put hand to his regular work, stood by the bedside, with
composed countenance, with words of hope, and agonized heart. Each day
of trial made his boy more dear. With a trembling pride Southey saw the
sufferer’s behaviour, beautiful in this illness as in all his life;
nothing could be more calm, more patient, more collected, more dutiful,
more admirable. At last, worn with watching, Southey and his wife were
prevailed upon to lie down. The good Mary Barker watched, and it is she
who writes the following lines:—“Herbert!—that sweetest and most perfect
of all children on this earth, who died in my arms at nine years of age,
whose death I announced to his father and mother in their bed, where I
had prayed and persuaded them to go. When Southey could speak, his first
words were, ‘_The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed
be the name of the Lord!_’ Never can I forget that moment” (1816).

“I am perfectly resigned,” Southey wrote to Bedford on the most mournful
of all days, “and do not give way to grief. Thank God I can control
myself for the sake of others.” But next morning found him weak as a
child, even weaker in body than in mind, for long anxiety had worn him
to the bone, and while he tried to calm and console the rest, his limbs
trembled under him. His first wild wish to fly from Keswick passed away;
it was good to be there near the boy’s grave. Weak as he was, he flung
himself upon his work. “I employ myself incessantly, taking, however,
every day as much exercise as I can bear without injurious fatigue, which
is not much.” “It would surprise you were you to see what I get through
in a day.” “For the first week I did as much every day as would at other
times have seemed the full and overflowing produce of three.” From his
early discipline in the stoical philosophy some help now was gained;
from his active and elastic mind the gain was more; but these would have
been insufficient to support him without a heart-felt and ever-present
faith that what he had lost was not lost for ever. A great change had
indeed come upon him. He set his house in order, and made arrangements
as if his own death were at hand. He resolved not to be unhappy, but the
joyousness of his disposition had received its death-wound; he felt as
if he had passed at once from boyhood to the decline of life. He tried
dutifully to make head against his depression, but at times with poor
success. “I employ myself, and have recovered strength, but in point
of spirits I rather lose ground.” Still, there are hidden springs of
comfort. “The head and flower of my earthly happiness is cut off. But I
am _not_ unhappy.” “When I give way to tears, which is only in darkness
or solitude, they are not tears of unmingled pain.” All beloved ones grew
more precious; the noble fortitude of his wife made her more than ever
a portion of his best self. His uncle’s boy, Edward, he could not love
more than he had loved him before; but, “as far as possible, he will
be to me hereafter,” writes Southey, “in the place of my son.” And in
truth the blessing of Herbert’s boyhood remained with him still; a most
happy, a most beautiful boyhood it had been; he was thankful for having
possessed the child so long; “for worlds I would not but have been his
father.” “I have abundant blessings left; for each and all of these I
am truly thankful; but of all the blessings which God has given me, this
child, who is removed, is the one I _still_ prize the most.” To relieve
feelings which he dared not utter with his lips, he thought of setting
about a monument in verse for Herbert and himself, which might make one
inseparable memory for father and son. A page or two of fragmentary
thoughts in verse and prose for this poetic monument exists, but Southey
could not keep his imagination enough above his heart to dare to go on
with it; to do so would have dissolved his heart anew. One or two of
these holy scriptures of woe, truly red drops of Southey’s life-blood,
will tell enough of this love passing the love of women.

“Thy life was a day; and sum it well, life is but a week of
such days—with how much storm and cold and darkness! Thine was
a sweet spring day—a vernal Sabbath, all sunshine, hope, and
promise.”

* * * * *

“And that name
In sacred silence buried, which was still
At morn and eve the never-wearying theme
Of dear discourse.”

* * * * *

“Playful thoughts
Turned now to gall and esil.”

* * * * *

“No more great attempts, only a few autumnal flowers like
second primroses, etc.”

* * * * *

“They who look for me in our Father’s kingdom
Will look for him also; inseparably
Shall we be remembered.”

* * * * *

“Come, then,
Pain and Infirmity—appointed guests,
My heart is ready.”

From the day of his son’s death Southey began to step down from the
heights of life, with a steadfast foot, and head still held erect. He
recovered cheerfulness, but it was as one who has undergone an amputation
seeks the sunshine. Herbert’s grave anchored him in Keswick. An offer of
2000_l._ a year for a daily article in the _Times_ did not tempt him to
London. His home, his books, his literary work, Skiddaw, Derwentwater,
and Crosthwaite churchyard were too dear. Three years later came the
unlooked-for birth of a second boy; and Cuthbert was loved by his
father; but the love was chastened and controlled of autumnal beauty and
seriousness.

When the war with France had ended, depression of trade was acutely felt
in England; party spirit ran high, and popular passions were dangerously
roused. In the spring of 1817, the Laureate saw to his astonishment
a poem entitled _Wat Tyler_, by Robert Southey, advertised as just
published. He had written this lively dramatic sketch in the full fervour
of Republicanism twenty-three years previously; the manuscript had passed
into other hands, and he had long ceased to think of it. The skulking
rogue and the knavish publisher who now gave it to the world had chosen
their time judiciously; this rebuke to the apostate of the _Quarterly_
would be a sweet morsel for gossip-mongers to roll under the tongue, an
infallible pill to purge melancholy with all true children of progress.
No fewer than sixty thousand copies, it is said, were sold. _Wat Tyler_
suited well with Southey’s nonage; it has a Bright rhetorical fierceness
of humanity. The speech-making radical blacksmith, “still toiling, yet
still poor,” his insulted daughter, her virtuous lover, the communist
priest John Ball, whose amiable theology might be that of Mr. Belsham in
his later days, stand over against the tyrant king, his Archiepiscopal
absolver from oaths, the haughty nobles, and the servile minions of the
law. There was nothing in the poem that could be remembered with shame,
unless it is shameful to be generous and inexperienced at the age of
twenty. But England in 1817 seemed charged with combustibles, and even
so small a spark as this was not to be blown about without a care. The
Prince Regent had been fired at; there were committals for treason;
there were riots in Somersetshire; the swarm of Manchester Blanketeers
announced a march to London; the Habeas Corpus was suspended; before
the year was out, Brandreth and his fellows had been executed at Derby.
Southey applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction to restrain
the publication of his poem. It was refused by Lord Eldon, on the ground
that the publication being one calculated to do injury to society, the
author could not reclaim his property in it. There the matter might have
dropped; but it seemed good to Mr. William Smith, representing liberal
Norwich, where Southey had many friends, to take his seat in the House
of Commons one evening with the _Quarterly Review_ in one pocket and
_Wat Tyler_ in the other, and to read aloud contrasted extracts showing
how the malignant renegade could play the parts, as it suited him, of a
seditious firebrand and a servile courtier. Wynn on the spot administered
a well-deserved rebuke; Wilberforce wrote to Southey that, had he been
present, his voice would also have been heard. Coleridge vindicated him
in the _Courier_. Seldom, indeed, was Southey drawn into controversy.
When pelted with abuse, he walked on with uplifted head, and did not turn
round; it seemed to him that he was of a stature to invite bespattering.
His self-confidence was high and calm; that he possessed no common
abilities, was certain: and the amount of toil which went into his
books gave him a continual assurance of their worth which nothing could
gainsay; he had no time for moods of dejection and self-distrust. But
if Southey struck, he struck with force, and tried to leave his mark on
his antagonist. To repel this attack made in the House of Commons, was a
duty. _A Letter to William Smith, Esq., M.P._, was written, as Wordsworth
wished, with the strength of masculine indignation; blow after blow
is planted with sure effect; no word is wasted; there is skill in the
hard hitting; and the antagonist fairly overthrown, Southey, with one
glance of scorn, turns on his heel, and moves lightly away. “I wish you
joy,” wrote Walter Scott, “of your triumphant answer.... Enough of this
gentleman, who I think will not walk out of the round again to slander
the conduct of individuals.” The concluding sentences of the Letter give
in brief Southey’s fearless review of his unstained career.

“How far the writings of Mr. Southey may be found to deserve a
favourable acceptance from after-ages, time will decide; but a
name which, whether worthily or not, has been conspicuous in
the literary history of its age, will certainly not perish....
It will be related that he lived in the bosom of his family,
in absolute retirement; that in all his writings there
breathed the same abhorrence of oppression and immorality,
the same spirit of devotion, and the same ardent wishes for
the melioration of mankind; and that the only charge which
malice could bring against him was, that as he grew older, his
opinions altered concerning the means by which that melioration
was to be effected, and that as he learnt to understand the
institutions of his country, he learnt to appreciate them
rightly, to love, and to revere, and to defend them. It will
be said of him that in an age of personality he abstained
from satire; and that during the course of his literary life,
often as he was assailed, the only occasion on which he ever
condescended to reply was when a certain Mr. William Smith
insulted him in Parliament with the appellation of renegade.
On that occasion, it will be said, he vindicated himself, as
it became him to do, and treated his calumniator with just
and memorable severity. Whether it shall be added that Mr.
William Smith redeemed his own character by coming forward with
honest manliness, and acknowledging but is not of the slightest
importance to me.”

One other personal strife is worthy of notice. When visiting London in
1813, he made the acquaintance of Byron. “Is Southey magnanimous?” Byron
asked Rogers, remembering how he had tried his wit in early days on
_Thalaba_ and _Madoc_. Rogers could answer for Southey’s magnanimity,
and the two poets met, Southey finding in Byron very much more to like
than he had expected, and Byron being greatly struck by Southey’s “epic
appearance.” “To have that poet’s head and shoulders,” he said, “I would
almost have written his Sapphics.” And in his diary he wrote:—“Southey’s
talents are of the first order. His prose is perfect.... He has probably
written too much of poetry for the present generation; posterity will
probably select; but he has passages equal to anything.” At a later
date Byron thought Southey’s _Roderick_ “the first poem of the time.”
But when about to publish _Don Juan_, a work “too free for these very
modest days,” what better mode of saucily meeting public opinion, and
getting a first laugh on his side, than to dedicate such a poem to a
virtuous Laureate, and show that he and his fellows, who had uttered
nothing base, were yet political turncoats, not entitled by any superfine
morality to assume airs of indignation against him and his reprobate
hero? The dedication was shown about and laughed over though not yet
printed. Southey heard of these things, and felt released from that
restraint of good feeling which made him deal tenderly in his writings
with every one to whom he had once given his hand. An attack upon
himself would not alone have roused Southey; no man received abuse with
more self-possession. Political antagonism would still have left him
able to meet a fellow-poet on the common ground of literature. When
distress fastened upon Leigh Hunt, whose _Examiner_ and _Liberal_ had
never spared the Laureate, Mr. Forster did not hesitate to apply to
Southey for assistance, which was declined solely because the circular
put forward Leigh Hunt’s political services as those chiefly entitling
him to relief. “Those who are acquainted with me,” Southey wrote, “know
that I am neither resentful nor intolerant;” and after expressing
admiration of Leigh Hunt’s powers, the letter goes on to suggest that
his friends should draw up a circular in which, without compromising
any of his opinions, the appeal might be made solely upon the score
of literary merit, “placing him thus, as it were, within the sacred
territory which ought always to be considered and respected as neutral
ground.” Wise and admirable words! But there was one offence which was
to Southey the unforgivable sin against the holy spirit of a nation’s
literature. To entice poetry from the altar, and to degrade her for the
pleasure of wanton imaginations, seemed to Southey, feeling as he did
the sanctity of the love of husband and wife, of father and child, to
be treason against humanity. Southey was, indeed, tolerant of a certain
Rabelaisian freedom in playing with some of the enclosed incidents of
our life. “All the greatest of poets,” he says, “have had a spice of
Pantagruelism in their composition, which I verily believe was essential
to their greatness.” But to take an extravagant fling in costume of a
_sans-culotte_, and to play the part of “pander-general to the youth of
Great Britain,” were different things. In his preface to _A Vision of
Judgment_, Southey deplored the recent fall in the ethical spirit of
English literature, “which for half a century had been distinguished
for its moral purity,” and much of the guilt he laid on the leaders of
“the Satanic School.” In the long-run the interests of art, as of all
high endeavour, are invariably proved to be one with the interest of a
nation’s morality. It had taken many lives of men to lift literature out
of the beast. From prudential virtue and the lighter ethics of Addison
it had risen to the grave moral dignity of Johnson, and from that to the
impassioned spirituality of Wordsworth. Should all this be abandoned,
and should literature now be permitted to reel back into the brute? We
know that the title “Satanic School” struck home, that Byron was moved,
and replied with brilliant play of wit in his _Vision of Judgment_. The
laughers went over to Byron’s side. One who would be witty has certain
advantages, if content to disregard honesty and good manners. To be witty
was not Southey’s concern. “I saw,” he said, many years after, “that
Byron was a man of quick impulses, strong passions, and great powers. I
saw him abuse these powers; and, looking at the effect of his writings on
the public mind, it was my duty to denounce such of them as aimed at the
injury of morals and religion. This was all.” If continental critics find
in what he set down a characteristic example of the bourgeois morality of
England, we note with interest their point of view.[13]

“Bertha, Kate, and Isabel,” wrote Southey on June 26, 1820, “you have
been very good girls, and have written me very nice letters, with which
I was much pleased. This is the last letter which I can write in return;
and as I happen to have a quiet hour to myself here at Streatham, on
Monday noon, I will employ that hour in relating to you the whole history
and manner of my being ell-ell-deed at Oxford by the Vice-Chancellor.”
Public distinctions of this kind he rated, perhaps, below their true
value. To stand well with Murray and Longman was more to him than any
handle to his name. A similar honour from Cambridge he declined. His
gold medal from the Royal Society of Literature he changed for a silver
coffee-pot for Mrs. Southey. To “be be-doctored and called everything
that ends in issimus,” was neither any harm nor much good; but to take
his seat between such doctors as the Duke of Wellington, and—perhaps—Sir
Walter Scott was a temptation. When his old schoolfellow Phillimore
presented Southey, the theatre rang with applause. Yet the day was,
indeed, one of the heaviest in his life. Never had he stopped for a night
in Oxford since he left it in 1794, intending to bid farewell to Europe
for an Utopia in some back settlement of America. Not one who really
loved him—for Scott could not appear—was present. When in the morning
he went to look at Balliol, no one remembered him except old Adams, who
had attempted to dress his hair as a freshman, and old Mrs. Adams, the
laundress, both now infirm. From the tumultuous theatre Southey strolled
into Christ Church walks alone. What changes time had made! Many of
the friends with whom he had sauntered there were in their graves. So
brooding, he chewed the bitter-sweet of remembrance, until at length
a serious gratitude prevailed. “Little girls,” the letter ends, “you
know it might be proper for me now to wear a large wig, and to be called
Doctor Southey, and to become very severe, and leave off being a comical
papa. And if you should find that ell-ell-deeing has made this difference
in me, you will not be surprised. However, I shall not come down in my
wig, neither shall I wear my robes at home.”

While in Holland, in the summer of 1826, a more conspicuous honour
was unexpectedly thrust upon Southey. The previous year he had gone
abroad with Henry Taylor, and at Douay was bitten on the foot by Satan,
according to his conjecture, sitting squat at his great toe; at Leyden he
was obliged to rest his inflamed foot, and there it was his good fortune
to be received into the house of the poet Bilderdijk, a delightful
old erudite and enthusiast, whose charming wife was the translator
of _Roderick_. In 1826 he visited his kind friends once more, and at
Brussels received the surprising intelligence that during his absence he
had been elected a member of Parliament. Lord Radnor, an entire stranger,
had read with admiration Southey’s confession of faith concerning Church
and State, in the last paragraph of his _Book of the Church_. By his
influence the poet had been elected for the borough of Downton: the
return, however, was null, for Southey held a pension during pleasure;
and even if this were resigned, where was the property qualification?
This latter objection was met by Sir Robert Inglis, who desired to know
whether Southey would sit in Parliament if an estate of 300_l._ a year
were purchased for him. An estate of 300_l._ a year would be a very
agreeable thing to Robert Lackland; but he had no mind to enter on a new
public sphere for which he was ill qualified by his previous life, to
risk the loss of health by midnight debates, to abandon the education of
his little boy, and to separate himself more or less from his wife and
daughters. He could not be wrong, he believed, in the quiet confidence
which assured him that he was in his proper place.

Now more than ever before, Edith Southey needed her husband’s sustaining
love. On the day of his return to Keswick, while amused to find himself
the object of mob popularity, he learnt that one of his daughters was
ailing; the illness, however, already seemed to have passed the worst.
This appearance of amendment quickly proved deceptive; and, on a Sunday
evening in mid July, Isabel, “the most radiant creature that I ever
beheld or shall behold,” passed away, while her father was on his knees
in the room below, praying that she might be released from suffering
either by recovery or by death. All that had been gone through ten years
before, renewed itself with dread exactness. Now, as then, the first day
was one of stunned insensibility; now, as then, the next morning found
him weak as a child, and striving in his weakness to comfort those who
needed his support; now, as then, he turned to Grosvenor Bedford for
a heart on which he might lay his own heart prone, letting his sorrow
have its way. “Nothing that has assailed my character, or affected my
worldly fortune, ever gave me an hour’s vexation, or deprived me of an
hour’s rest. My happiness has been in my family, and there only was I
vulnerable; that family is now divided between earth and heaven, and I
must pray to remain with those who are left, so long as I can contribute
to their welfare and comfort, rather than be gathered (as otherwise I
would fain be) to those who are gone.” On that day of which the word
Τετέλεσται is the record, the day on which the body of his bright Isabel
was committed to earth, Southey wrote a letter to his three living
daughters, copied with his own hand for each. It said what he could
not bear to say of consolation and admonishment by word of mouth; it
prepared them for the inevitable partings to come; it urged on them with
measureless tenderness the duty of self-watchfulness, of guarding against
little faults, of bearing and forbearing; it told them of his own grief
to think that he should ever by a harsh or hasty word have given their
dead sister even a momentary sorrow which might have been spared; it
ended with the blessing of their afflicted father.

Sorrows of this kind, as Southey has truly said, come the heavier when
they are repeated; under such strokes a courageous heart may turn coward.
On Mrs. Southey a weight as of years had been laid; her spirits sank, her
firmness gave way, a breath of danger shook her. Southey’s way of bearing
himself towards the dead is that saddest way—their names were never
uttered; each one of the household had, as it were, a separate chamber
in which the images of their dead ones lay, and each went in alone and
veiled. The truth is, Southey had little native hardihood of temperament;
self-control with him was painfully acquired. In solitude and darkness
his tears flowed; when in his slumbers the images of the dead came to
him, he could not choose but weep. Therefore, all the more among those
whom he wished to lead into the cheerful ways of life, he had need to
keep a guard upon his tenderness. He feared to preserve relics, and did
not like to bear in mind birthdays, lest they should afterwards become
too dangerously charged with remembrance and grief. “Look,” he writes,
“at some verses in the _Literary Souvenir_, p. 113; they are written by
a dear friend of mine on the death of—you will know who”—for his pen
would have trembled in tracing the name Isabel. And yet his habitual
feelings with respect to those who had departed were not bitter; the dead
were absent—that was all; he thought of them and of living friends at a
distance with the same complacency, the same affection, only with more
tenderness of the dead.

Greta Hall, once resounding with cheerful voices, had been growing
silent. Herbert was gone; Isabel was gone. In 1829 Sara Coleridge went, a
bride, tearful yet glad, her mother accompanying her, to distant London.
Five years later, Edith May Southey became the wife of the Rev. John
Warter. Her father fell back, even more than in former years, upon the
never-failing friends of his library. It was in these darkening years
that he sought relief in carrying out the idea, conceived long before, of
a story which should be no story, but a spacious receptacle for mingled
wit and wisdom, experience and book-lore, wholesome nonsense and solemn
meditation. _The Doctor_, begun in jest after merry talks with Grosvenor
Bedford, grew more and more earnest as Southey proceeded. “He dreamt
over it and brooded over it, laid it aside for months and years, resumed
it after long intervals, and more often, latterly, in thoughtfulness
than in mirth, and fancied at last that he could put into it more of his
mind than could conveniently be produced in any other form.” The secret
of its authorship was carefully kept. Southey amused himself somewhat
laboriously with ascribing it now to this hand and now to that. When
the first two volumes arrived, as if from the anonymous author, Southey
thrust them away with well-assumed impatience, and the disdainful words,
“Some novel, I suppose.” Yet several of his friends had shrewd suspicions
that the manuscript lay somewhere hidden in Greta Hall, and on receiving
their copies wrote to thank the veritable donor; these thanks were
forwarded by Southey, not without a smile in which something of irony
mingled, to Theodore Hook, who was not pleased to enter into the jest. “I
see in _The Doctor_,” says its author, playing the part of an impartial
critic, “a little of Rabelais, but not much; more of Tristram Shandy,
somewhat of Burton, and perhaps more of Montaigne; but methinks the
_quintum quid_ predominates?” The _quintum quid_ is that wisdom of the
heart, that temper of loyal and cheerful acquiescence in the rule of life
as appointed by a Divine Master, which characterizes Southey.

For the third volume of _The Doctor_, in that chapter which tells of
Leonard Bacon’s sorrow for his Margaret, Southey wrote as follows:

“Leonard had looked for consolation, where, when sincerely
sought, it is always to be found; and he had experienced
that religion effects in a true believer all that philosophy
professes, and more than all that mere philosophy can perform.
The wounds which stoicism would cauterize, religion heals.

“There is a resignation with which, it may be feared, most of
us deceive ourselves. To bear what must be borne, and submit to
what cannot be resisted, is no more than what the unregenerate
heart is taught by the instinct of animal nature. But to
acquiesce in the afflictive dispensations of Providence—to make
one’s own will conform in all things to that of our Heavenly
Father—to say to him in the sincerity of faith, when we drink
of the bitter cup, ‘Thy will be done!’—to bless the name of
the Lord as much from the heart when he takes away as when he
gives, and with a depth of feeling of which, perhaps, none but
the afflicted heart is capable—this is the resignation which
religion teaches, this is the sacrifice which it requires.”

These words, written with no forefeeling, were the last put on paper
before the great calamity burst upon Southey. “I have been parted from
my wife,” he tells Grosvenor Bedford on October 2, 1834, “by something
worse than death. Forty years she has been the life of my life; and I
have left her this day in a lunatic asylum.”

Southey’s union with his wife had been at the first one of love, and
use and wont had made her a portion of his very being. Their provinces
in the household had soon defined themselves. He in the library earned
their means of support; all else might be left to her with absolute
confidence in her wise contrivance and quiet energy. Beneath the divided
work in their respective provinces their lives ran on in deep and still
accord. Now he felt for the first time shrunk into the limits of a
solitary will. All that had grown out of the past was deranged by a
central disturbance; no branch had been lopped away, but the main trunk
was struck, and seared, and shaken to the roots. “Mine is a strong
heart,” Southey writes; “I will not say that the last week has been the
most trying of my life; but I will say that the heart which could bear
it can bear anything.” Yet, when he once more set himself to work, a
common observer, says his son, would have noticed little change in him,
though to his family the change was great indeed. His most wretched hour
was when he woke at dawn from broken slumbers; but a word of hope was
enough to counteract the mischief of a night’s unrest. No means were
neglected which might serve to keep him in mental and bodily health; he
walked in all weathers; he pursued his task-work diligently, yet not
over-diligently; he collected materials for work of his choice. When, in
the spring of 1835, it was found that the sufferer might return to wear
out the body of this death in her own home, it was marvellous, declares
Cuthbert Southey, how much of his old elasticity remained, and how,
though no longer happy, he could be contented and cheerful, and take
pleasure in the pleasures of others. He still could contribute something
to his wife’s comfort. Through the weary dream which was now her life she
knew him, and took pleasure in his coming and going.

When Herbert died, Southey had to ask a friend to lend him money to
tide over the short period of want which followed his weeks of enforced
inaction. Happily now, for the first time in his life, his income was
beforehand with his expenses. A bequest of some hundreds of pounds had
come in; his _Naval Biographies_ were paying him well; and during part
of Mrs. Southey’s illness he was earning a respectable sum, intended for
his son’s education, by his _Life of Cowper_—a work to which a painful
interest was added by the study of mental alienation forced upon him
in his own household. So the days passed, not altogether cheerlessly,
in work if possible more arduous than ever. “One morning,” writes his
son, “shortly after the letters had arrived, he called me into his
study. ‘You will be surprised,’ he said, ‘to hear that Sir Robert Peel
has recommended me to the King for the distinction of a baronetcy, and
will probably feel some disappointment when I tell you that I shall not
accept it.’” Accompanying Sir Robert Peel’s official communication came
a private letter asking in the kindest manner how he could be of use
to Southey. “Will you tell me,” he said, “without reserve, whether the
possession of power puts within my reach the means of doing anything
which can be serviceable or acceptable to you; and whether you will
allow me to find some compensation for the many sacrifices which office
imposes upon me, in the opportunity of marking my gratitude, as a public
man, for the eminent services you have rendered, not only to literature,
but to the higher interests of virtue and religion?” Southey’s answer
stated simply what his circumstances were, showing how unbecoming and
unwise it would be to accept the proffered honour: it told the friendly
statesman of the provision made for his family—no inconsiderable one—in
the event of his death; it went on to speak of his recent affliction; how
this had sapped his former confidence in himself; how it had made him an
old man, and forced upon him the reflection that a sudden stroke might
deprive him of those faculties by which his family had hitherto been
supported. “I could afford to die, but not to be disabled,” he wrote in
his first draft; but fearing that these words would look as if he wanted
to trick out pathetically a plain statement, he removed them. Finally,
if such an increase of his pension as would relieve him from anxiety on
behalf of his family could form part of a plan for the encouragement of
literature, it would satisfy all his desires. “Young as I then was,”
Cuthbert Southey writes, “I could not, without tears, hear him read with
his deep and faltering voice, his wise refusal and touching expression
of those feelings and fears he had never before given utterance to, to
any of his own family.” Two months later Sir Robert Peel signed a warrant
adding 300_l._ annually to Southey’s existing pension. He had resolved to
recognize literary and scientific eminence as a national claim; the act
was done upon public grounds, and Southey had the happiness of knowing
that others beside himself would partake of the benefit.

“Our domestic prospects are darkening upon us daily,” Southey wrote in
July, 1835. “I know not whether the past or the present seems most like
a dream to me, so great and strange is the difference. But yet a little
while, and all will again be at the best.” While Mrs. Southey lived, a
daily demand was made upon his sympathies and solicitude which it was
his happiness to fulfil. But from all except his wife he seemed already
to be dropping away into a state of passive abstraction. Kate and Bertha
silently ministered to his wants, laid the books he wanted in his way,
replenished his ink-bottle, mended his pens, stirred the fire, and
said nothing. A visit to the south-west of England in company with his
son broke the long monotony of endurance. It was a happiness to meet
Landor at Bristol, and Mrs. Bray at Tavistock, and Mrs. Bray’s friend,
the humble poet, Mary Colling, whose verses he had reviewed in the
_Quarterly_. Yet to return to his sorrowful home was best of all; there
is a leap up of the old spirits in a letter to his daughters announcing
his approach. It is almost the last gleam of brightness. In the autumn of
that year (1835) Edith Southey wasted away, growing weaker and weaker.
The strong arm on which she had leaned for two-and-forty years, supported
her down stairs each day and bore her up again at evening. When the
morning of November 16th broke, she passed quietly “from death unto life.”

From that day Southey was an altered man. His spirits fell to a still
lower range. For the first time he was conscious of the distance which
years had set between him and his children. Yet his physical strength
was unbroken; nothing but snow deterred him from his walk; he could
still circle the lake, or penetrate into Borrowdale on foot. But Echo,
whom he had summoned to rejoice, was not roused by any call of his.
Within-doors it was only by a certain violence to himself that he could
speak. In the library he read aloud his proof-sheets alone; but for this
he might almost have forgotten the sound of his own voice. Still, he was
not wholly abandoned to grief; he looked back and saw that life had been
good; its hardest moral discipline had served to train the heart: much
still remained that was of worth—Cuthbert was quietly pursuing his Oxford
studies; Bertha was about to be united in marriage to her cousin, Herbert
Hill, son of that good uncle who had done so much to shape Southey’s
career. “If not hopeful,” he writes, “I am more than contented, and
disposed to welcome and entertain any good that may yet be in store for
me, without any danger of being disappointed if there should be none.”
Hope of a sober kind indeed had come to him. For twenty years he had
known Caroline Bowles; they had long been in constant correspondence;
their acquaintance had matured into friendship. She was now in her
fifty-second year; he in his sixty-fifth. It seemed to Southey natural
that, without making any breach with his past life, he should accept her
companionship in the nearest way possible, should give to her all he
could of what remained, and save himself from that forlorn feeling which
he feared might render old age miserable and useless.

But already the past had subdued Southey, and if any future lay before
him it was a cloud lifeless and grey. In the autumn of 1838 he started
for a short tour on the Continent with his old friend Senhouse, his son
Cuthbert, John Kenyon, their master of the horse, Captain Jones, the
chamberlain, and Crabb Robinson, who was intendant and paid the bills.
On the way from Boulogne they turned aside to visit Chinon, for Southey
wished to stand on the spot where his first heroine, Joan of Arc, had
recognized the French king. At Paris he roamed along the quays and hunted
book-stalls. The change and excitement seemed to have served him; he
talked freely and was cheerful. “Still,” writes his son, “I could not
fail to perceive a considerable change in him from the time we had last
travelled together—all his movements were slower, he was subject to
frequent fits of absence, and there was an indecision in his manner and
an unsteadiness in his step which was wholly unusual with him.” He often
lost his way, even in the hotels; then laughed at his own mistakes,
and yet was painfully conscious of his failing memory. His journal
breaks off abruptly when not more than two-thirds of the tour had been
accomplished. In February, 1839, his brother, Dr. Southey—ever a true
comrade—describes him as working slowly and with an abstraction not usual
to him; sometimes to write even a letter seemed an effort. In midsummer
his marriage to Caroline Bowles took place, and with her he returned to
Keswick in August. On the way home his friends in London saw that he was
much altered. “The animation and peculiar clearness of his mind,” wrote
Henry Taylor, “was quite gone, except a gleam or two now and then....
The appearance was that of a placid languor, sometimes approaching
to torpor, but not otherwise than cheerful. He is thin and shrunk in
person, and that extraordinary face of his has no longer the fire and
strength it used to have, though the singular cast of the features and
the habitual expressions make it still a most remarkable phenomenon.”
Still, his friends had not ceased to hope that tranquillity would restore
mental tone, and he himself was planning the completion of great designs.
“As soon as we are settled at Keswick, I shall resolutely begin upon
the _History of Portugal_, as a duty which I owe to my uncle’s memory.
Half of the labour I consider as done. But I have long since found the
advantage of doing more than one thing at a time, and the _History of the
Monastic Orders_ is the other thing to which I shall set to with hearty
good-will. Both these are works of great pith and moment.”

Alas! the current of these enterprises was already turned awry. In
August it was not without an occasional uncertainty that he sustained
conversation. “He lost himself for a moment; he was conscious of it, and
an expression passed over his countenance which was very touching—an
expression of pain and also of resignation.... The charm of his manner
is perhaps even enhanced at present (at least when one knows the
circumstances) by the gentleness and patience which pervade it.” Before
long the character of his handwriting, which had been so exquisite, was
changed to something like the laboured scrawl of a child; then he ceased
to write. Still he could read, and, even when he could no longer take
in the meaning of what was before him, his eye followed the lines of
the printed page. At last even this was beyond his power. He would walk
slowly round his library, pleased with the presence of his cherished
possessions, taking some volume down mechanically from the shelf. In 1840
Wordsworth went over to Greta Hall. “Southey did not recognize me,” he
writes, “till he was told. Then his eyes flashed for a moment with their
former brightness, but he sank into the state in which I had found him,
patting with both hands his books affectionately like a child.” In the
_Life of Cowper_ he had spoken of the distress of one who suffers from
mental disease as being that of a dream—“a dream, indeed, from which the
sufferer can neither wake nor be awakened; but it pierces no deeper,
and there seems to be the same dim consciousness of its unreality.” So
was it now with himself. Until near the end he retained considerable
bodily strength; his snow-white hair grew darker; it was the spirit which
had endured shattering strokes of fate, and which had spent itself in
studying to be quiet.

After a short attack of fever, the end came on the 21st of March, 1843.
Never was that “Well done!” the guerdon of the good and faithful servant,
pronounced amid a deeper consent of those who attended and had ears
to hear. On a dark and stormy morning Southey’s body was borne to the
beautiful churchyard of Crosthwaite, towards which he had long looked
affectionately as his place of rest. There lay his three children and
she who was the life of his life. Skiddaw gloomed solemnly overhead. A
grey-haired, venerable man who had crossed the hills stood there leaning
on the arm of his son-in-law; these two, Wordsworth and Quillinan, were
the only strangers present. As the words, “ashes to ashes,” were uttered,
a sudden gleam of sunshine touched the grave; the wind dropped, the rain
was over, and the birds had begun their songs of spring. The mourners
turned away thinking of a good man’s life and death with peace—

“And calm of mind, all passion spent.”

CHAPTER VII.

SOUTHEY’S WORK IN LITERATURE.

Southey’s career of authorship falls into two chief periods—a period
during which poetry occupied the higher place and prose the lower, and a
period during which this order was reversed. His translations of romantic
fiction—_Amadis of Gaul_, _Palmerin of England_, and _The Cid_—connect
the work of the earlier with that of the latter period, and serve to mark
the progress of his mind from legend to history, and from the fantastic
to the real. The poet in Southey died young, or, if he did not die, fell
into a numbness and old age like that of which an earlier singer writes:—

“Elde that in my spirit dulleth me,
Hath of endyting all the subtilité
Welnyghe bereft out of my remembraunce.”

After thirty Southey seldom cared to utter himself in occasional verse.
The uniformity of his life, the equable cheerfulness maintained by habits
of regular work, his calm religious faith, his amiable Stoicism, left him
without the material for lyrical poetry; and one so honest and healthy
had no care to feign experiences of the heart which were not his. Still,
he could apply himself to the treatment of large subjects with a calm,
continuous energy; but as time went on his hand grew slack, and wrought
with less ease. Scarcely had he overcome the narrative poet’s chief
difficulty, that of subduing varied materials to an unity of design, when
he put aside verse, and found it more natural to be historian than poet.

The poetry of sober feeling is rare in lyrical verse. This may be
found admirably rendered in some of Southey’s shorter pieces. Although
his temper was ardent and hopeful, his poems of pensive remembrance,
of meditative calm, are perhaps the most characteristic. Among these
his _Inscriptions_ rank high. Some of those in memory of the dead are
remarkable for their fine poise of feeling, all that is excessive and
transitory having been subdued; for the tranquil depths of sorrow and of
hope which lie beneath their clear, melodious words.

Southey’s larger poetical works are fashioned of two materials which
do not always entirely harmonize. First, material brought from his own
moral nature; his admiration of something elevated in the character of
man or woman—generosity, gentleness, loyalty, fortitude, faith. And,
secondly, material gathered from abroad; mediæval pomps of religion and
circumstance of war; Arabian marvels, the work of the enchanters and the
genii; the wild beauties and adventure of life amid New-World tribes;
the monstrous mythology of the Brahman. With such material the poet’s
inventive talent deals freely, rearranges details or adds to them;
still Southey is here rather a _finder_ than a _maker_. His diligence
in collecting and his skill in arranging were so great that it was well
if the central theme did not disappear among manifold accessories. One
who knows Southey, however, can recognize his ethical spirit in every
poem. Thalaba, as he himself confessed, is a male Joan of Arc. Destiny
or Providence has marked alike the hero and the heroine from mankind;
the sheepfold of Domremi, and the palm-grove by old Moath’s tent, alike
nurture virgin purity and lofty aspiration. Thalaba, like Joan, goes
forth a delegated servant of the Highest to war against the powers of
evil; Thalaba, like Joan, is sustained under the trials of the way by
the sole talisman of faith. We are not left in doubt as to where Southey
found his ideal. Mr. Barbauld thought _Joan of Arc_ was modelled on the
Socinian Christ. He was mistaken; Southey’s ideal was native to his soul.
“Early admiration, almost adoration of Leonidas; early principles of
Stoicism derived from the habitual study of Epictetus, and the French
Revolution at its height when I was just eighteen—by these my mind was
moulded.” And from these, absorbed into Southey’s very being, came
Thalaba and Joan.

The word _high-souled_ takes possession of the mind as we think of
Southey’s heroic personages. Poetry, he held, ought rather to elevate
than to affect—a Stoical doctrine transferred to art, which meant that
his own poetry was derived more from admiration of great qualities
than from sympathy with individual men or women. Neither the quick and
passionate tenderness of Burns nor the stringent pathos of Wordsworth
can be found in Southey’s verse. No eye probably ever shed a tear over
the misery of Ladurlad and his persecuted daughter. She, like the lady
in _Comus_, is set above our pity and perhaps our love. In _Kehama_,
a work of Southey’s mature years, the chivalric ardour of his earlier
heroes is transformed into the sterner virtues of fortitude and an almost
despairing constancy. The power of evil, as conceived by the poet,
has grown more despotic; little can be achieved by the light-winged
Glendoveer—a more radiant Thalaba—against the Rajah; only the lidless
eye of Seeva can destroy that tyranny of lust and pride. _Roderick_
marks a higher stage in the development of Southey’s ethical ideal.
Roderick, too, is a delegated champion of right against force and fraud;
he too endures mighty pains. But he is neither such a combatant, pure
and intrepid, as goes forth from the Arab tent, nor such a blameless
martyr as Ladurlad. He is first a sinner enduring just punishment; then a
stricken penitent; and from his shame and remorse he is at last uplifted
by enthusiasm, on behalf of his God and his people, into a warrior saint,
the Gothic Maccabee.

_Madoc_ stands somewhat away from the line of Southey’s other narrative
poems. Though, as Scott objected, the personages in _Madoc_ are too
nearly abstract types, Southey’s ethical spirit dominates this poem less
than any of the others. The narrative flows on more simply. The New-World
portion tells a story full of picturesque incident, with the same skill
and grace that belong to Southey’s best prose writings. Landor highly
esteemed _Madoc_. Scott declared that he had read it three times since
his first cursory perusal, and each time with increased admiration of
the poetry. Fox was in the habit of reading aloud after supper to eleven
o’clock, when it was the rule at St. Ann’s Hill to retire; but while
_Madoc_ was in his hand, he read until after midnight. Those, however,
who opened the bulky quarto were few: the tale was out of relation with
the time; it interpreted no need, no aspiration, no passion of the
dawn of the present century. And the mind of the time was not enough
disengaged to concern itself deeply with the supposed adventures of a
Welsh prince of the twelfth century among the natives of America.

At heart, then, Southey’s poems are in the main the outcome of his moral
nature; this we recognize through all disguises—Mohammedan, Hindoo, or
Catholic. He planned and partly wrote a poem—_Oliver Newman_—which
should associate his characteristic ideal with Puritan principles and
ways of life. The foreign material through which his ethical idea was set
forth went far, with each poem, to determine its reception by the public.
Coleridge has spoken of “the pastoral charm and wild, streaming lights of
the _Thalaba_.” Dewy night moon-mellowed, and the desert-circle girdled
by the sky, the mystic palace of Shedad, the vernal brook, Oneiza’s
favourite kidling, the lamp-light shining rosy through the damsel’s
delicate fingers, the aged Arab in the tent-door—these came with a fresh
charm into English narrative poetry eighty years ago. The landscape and
the manners of Spain, as pictured in _Roderick_, are of marked grandeur
and simplicity. In _Kehama_, Southey attempted a bolder experiment; and
although the poem became popular, even a well-disposed reader may be
allowed to sympathize with the dismay of Charles Lamb among the monstrous
gods: “I never read books of travels, at least not farther than Paris or
Rome. I can just endure Moors, because of their connexion as foes with
Christians; but Abyssinians, Ethiops, Esquimaux, Dervises, and all that
tribe I hate. I believe I fear them in some manner. A Mohammedan turban
on the stage, though enveloping some well-known face, ... does not give
me unalloyed pleasure. I am a Christian, Englishman, Londoner, Templar.
God help me when I come to put off these snug relations, and to get
abroad into the world to come.”

Though his materials are often exotic, in style Southey aimed at the
simplicity and strength of undefiled English. If to these melody was
added, he had attained all he desired. To conversations with William
Taylor about German poetry—certainly not to Taylor’s example—he ascribes
his faith in the power of plain words to express in poetry the highest
thoughts and strongest feelings. He perceived, in his own day, the rise
of the ornate style, which has since been perfected by Tennyson, and
he regarded it as a vice in art. In early years Akenside had been his
instructor; afterwards he owed more to Landor than to any other master of
style. From _Madoc_ and _Roderick_—both in blank-verse—fragments could
be severed which might pass for the work of Landor; but Southey’s free
and facile manner, fostered by early reading of Ariosto, and by constant
study of Spenser, soon reasserts itself; from under the fragment of
monumental marble, white almost as Landor’s, a stream wells out smooth
and clear, and lapses away, never dangerously swift nor mysteriously
deep. On the whole, judged by the highest standards, Southey’s poetry
takes a midmost rank; it neither renders into art a great body of thought
and passion, nor does it give faultless expression to lyrical moments.
But it is the output of a large and vigorous mind, amply stored with
knowledge; its breath of life is the moral ardour of a nature strong and
generous, and therefore it can never cease to be of worth.

Southey is at his best in prose. And here it must be borne in mind
that, though so voluminous a writer, he did not achieve his most
important work, the _History of Portugal_, for which he had gathered
vast collections. It cannot be doubted that this, if completed, would
have taken a place among our chief histories. The splendour of story
and the heroic personages would have lifted Southey into his highest
mood. We cannot speak with equal confidence of his projected work of
second magnitude, the _History of the Monastic Orders_. Learned and
sensible it could not fail to be, and Southey would have recognized the
more substantial services of the founders and the brotherhoods; but he
would have dealt by methods too simple with the psychology of religious
emotions; the words enthusiasm and fraud might have risen too often to
his lips; and at the grotesque humours of the devout, which he would have
exhibited with delight, he might have been too prone to smile.

As it is, Southey’s largest works are not his most admirable. _The
History of Brazil_, indeed, gives evidence of amazing patience, industry,
and skill; but its subject necessarily excludes it from the first rank.
At no time from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century was Brazil a
leader or a banner-bearer among lands. The life of the people crept on
from point to point, and that is all; there are few passages in which
the chronicle can gather itself up, and transform itself into a historic
drama. Southey has done all that was possible; his pages are rich in
facts, and are more entertaining than perhaps any other writer could
have made them. His extraordinary acquaintance with travel gave him
many advantages in narrating the adventures of early explorers; and his
studies in ecclesiastical history led him to treat with peculiar interest
the history of the Jesuit Reductions.

_The History of the Peninsular War_ suffers by comparison with the great
work of Sir William Napier. That heroic man had himself been a portion of
the strife; his senses, singularly keen, were attuned to battle; as he
wrote, the wild bugle-calls, the measured tramp, the peals of musketry,
the dismal clamour, sounded in his ears; he abandoned himself again to
the swiftness and “incredible fury” of the charge. And with his falcon
eye he could discern amid the shock or formless dispersion, wherever
hidden, the fiery heart of victory. Southey wrought in his library as a
man of letters; consulted sources, turned over manuscripts, corresponded
with witnesses, set his material in order. The passion of justice and an
enthusiasm on behalf of Spain give unity to his work. If he estimated too
highly the disinterestedness and courage of the people of the Peninsula,
the illusion was generous. And it may be that enduring spiritual forces
become apparent to a distant observer, which are masked by accidents of
the day and hour from one who is in their midst.

History as written by Southey is narrative rendered spiritual by moral
ardour. There are no new political truths, he said. If there be laws of
a nation’s life other than those connected with elementary principles of
morality, Southey did not discover these. What he has written may go only
a little way towards attaining the ultimate ends of historical study,
but so far as it goes it keeps the direct line. It is not led astray by
will-o’-the-wisp, vague-shining theories that beguile night wanderers.
Its method is an honest method as wholesome as sweet; and simple
narrative, if ripe and sound at first, is none the less so at the end of
a century.

In biography, at least, one may be well pleased with clear and charming
narrative. Here Southey has not been surpassed, and even in this single
province he is versatile; he has written the life of a warrior, of a
poet, and of a saint. His industry was that of a German; his lucidity
and perfect exposition were such as we rarely find outside a French
memoir. There is no style fitter for continuous narrative than the
pedestrian style of Southey. It does not beat upon the ear with hard,
metallic vibration. The sentences are not cast by the thousand in one
mould of cheap rhetoric, nor made brilliant with one cheap colour.
Never dithyrambic, he is never dull; he affects neither the trick of
stateliness nor that of careless ease; he does not seek out curiosities
of refinement, nor caress delicate affectations. Because his style is
natural, it is inimitable, and the only way to write like Southey is to
write well.

“The favourite of my library, among many favourites;” so Coleridge speaks
of the _Life of Wesley_—“the book I can read for the twentieth time, when
I can read nothing else at all.” And yet the schoolboy’s favourite—the
_Life of Nelson_—is of happier inspiration. The simple and chivalric
hero, his splendid achievements, his pride in duty, his patriotism,
roused in Southey all that was most strong and high; but his enthusiasm
does not escape in lyrical speech. “The best eulogy of Nelson,” he says,
“is the faithful history of his actions; the best history that which
shall relate them most perspicuously.” Only when all is over, and the
captain of Trafalgar lies dead, his passion and pride find utterance:—“If
the chariot and the horses of fire had been vouchsafed for Nelson’s
translation, he could scarcely have departed in a brighter blaze of
glory.” From Nelson on the quarter-deck of the _Victory_, to Cowper
caressing his tame hares, the interval is wide; but Southey, the man of
letters, lover of the fireside, and patron of cats, found it natural to
sympathize with his brother poet. His sketches of literary history in
the _Life of Cowper_ are characteristic. The writer’s range is wide, his
judgment sound, his enjoyment of almost everything literary is lively; as
critic he is kindly yet equitable. But the highest criticism is not his.
Southey’s vision was not sufficiently penetrative; he culls beauties, but
he cannot pluck out the heart of a mystery.

His translations of romantic fiction, while faithful to their sources,
aim less at literal exactitude than at giving the English reader the
same pleasure which the Spaniard receives from the originals. From the
destruction of Don Quixote’s library Master Nicholas and the curate
spared _Amadis of Gaul_ and _Palmerin of England_. Second to Malory’s
grouping of the Arthur cycle _Amadis_ may well take its place. Its
chivalric spirit, its wildness, its tenderness and beauty, are carefully
preserved by the translator. But Southey’s chief gift in this kind
to English readers is _The Cid_. The poem he supposed, indeed, to be
a metrical chronicle instead of a metrical romance—no fatal error;
weaving together the best of the poem, the ballads and the chronicle, he
produced more than a mere compilation. “I know no work of the kind in our
language,” wrote Coleridge, “none which, uniting the charms of romance
and history, keeps the imagination so constantly on the wing, and yet
leaves so much for after-reflection.”

Of Southey’s political writings something has been said in a former
chapter. Among works which can be brought under no general head, one
that pleased the public was _Espriella’s Letters_, sketches of English
landscape, life, and manners, by a supposed Spanish traveller. The
letters, giving as they do a lively view of England at the beginning of
the present century, still possess an interest. Apart from Southey’s
other works stands _The Doctor_; nowhere else can one find so much of
his varied erudition, his genial spirits, his meditative wisdom. It asks
for a leisurely reader content to ramble everywhere and no whither, and
still pleased to take another turn because his companion has not yet come
to an end of learning, mirth, or meditation. That the author of a book
so characteristic was not instantly recognized, is strange. “The wit and
humour of _The Doctor_,” says Edgar Poe, a keen critic, “have seldom been
equalled. We cannot think Southey wrote it.” Gratitude is due to Dr.
Daniel Dove from innumerable “good little women and men,” who have been
delighted with his story of _The Three Bears_. To know that he had added
a classic to the nursery would have been the pride of Southey’s heart.
Wide eyes entranced and peals of young laughter still make a triumph for
one whose spirit, grave with a man’s wisdom, was pure as the spirit of a
little child.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Recollections of Corston, somewhat in the manner of Goldsmith’s
_Deserted Village_, will be found in Southey’s early poem, _The
Retrospect_.

[2] Carmen Nuptiale: Proem, 18.

[3] I find in a Catalogue of English Poetry, 1862, the following passage
from an autograph letter of S. T. Coleridge, dated Bristol, July 16,
1814, then in Mr. Pickering’s possession: “I looked over the first five
books of the first (quarto) edition of _Joan of Arc_ yesterday, at
Hood’s request, in order to mark the lines written by me. I was really
astonished—1, at the schoolboy, wretched allegoric machinery; 2, at the
transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a modern Novel-pawing
proselyte of the Age of Reason, a Tom Paine in petticoats, but so lovely!
and in love more dear! ‘_On her rubied cheek hung pity’s crystal gem_;’
3, at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and the
dead plumb down of the pauses, and of the absence of all bone, muscle,
and sinew in the single lines.”

[4] See Southey’s article on “Dr. Sayers’s Works,” _Quarterly Review_,
January, 1827.

[5] Harriet Martineau: Autobiography, i. p. 300.

[6] See her “History of the Peace,” B. vi. chap. xvi.

[7] For Westall’s drawing, and the description of Walla Crag, see “Sir
Thomas More:” Colloquy VI.

[8] _I. e._, to go to Davies’ lodgings; Davies, Dr. Bell’s Secretary,
was engaged in arranging a vast accumulation of papers with a view to
forwarding Southey in his _Life of Bell_.

[9] The words quoted by Southey are his own, written in 1809.

[10] “With the Cape and New Holland I would proceed thus:—‘Govern
yourselves, and we will protect you as long as you need protection;
when that is no longer necessary, remember that though we be different
countries, each independent, we are one people.’”—R. S. to W. S. Landor.
Letters, vol. ii. p. 263.

[11] Sara Coleridge.

[12] Mrs. Wilson—then aged seventy-two.

[13] To certain false allegations of fact made by Byron, Southey replied
in _The Courier_, and reprinted his letters in _Essays, Moral and
Political_, vol. ii. pp. 183-205.

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