LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 014 546 662 3 Vii/*':- ■ rrv iM^A> ^n3m ^^M^AA^^I LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. »AaAAAI •i^mA^r^Am mi^ M? ^^MmmM^ Mh^mtt!^hh 0:^arOo^AAA;,r *r\AA/\rvA^';^^«'A UkkhmM ffffMtm'mrh,r.r'^ m^'^^mmdmm U.M troubles; the world had been too strong for the poor linen-draper in Wine Street; he had struggled to m^jintain 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 def- inite 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 Mich- aelmas came, Southey went up to Oxford to matriculate; C 2* 26 SOUTHEY. [chak 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 sum- mons 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 Rous- seau 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 whole- somest 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 dis- graceful at the moment when Europe is on fire with free- dom — 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 en- thusiasm 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 philoso^ phizings, who declaimed for him on liberty, who dictated II.] OXFORD. 27 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 brill- iant 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 enjoy- able to become in turn sage, reformer, and enthusiast. Or perhaps we ought to say that all this time there was a real Robert Southcy, strong, upright, ardent, simple; and al- though this was quite too plain a person to serve the pur- poses of epistolary literature, it was he who gave their cues to the various ideal personages. This, at least, may be af- firmed — all Southey's unrealities were of a pure and gener- ous 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 catch- ing 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 acknowl- edged 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." 28 SOUTHEY. [chap. Epictctus cainc 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 rcsist- lessness. 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 indulg- ing 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 commend- ed simplicity of manners. But Rousseau's simplicity, not- withstanding that homage which he paid to the will, seem- ed to heat the atmosphere with strange passion, seemed to give rise to new curiosities and refinements of self-con- scious emotion. Epictetus showed how life could be sim- plified, 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 con- vinced that Stoicism, properly understood, is the best and noblest of systems." Much that Southey gained from Stoicism he kept throughout his whole life, tempered, in- deed, by the influences of a Christian faith, but not lost. He was no metaphysician, and a master who had placed II.] OXFORD. 29 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. lie 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 pur- sue 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 boat- ing. ... 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 mis- cellaneous 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, 30 SOUTHEY. [chap. Wynn and Liglitfoot. 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 me- diaeval 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 car- ried 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 prob- ably unacquainted with each other at that time even by name. Wordsw^orth 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 ut- tered himself in some thousands of blank verses. The II.] OXFORD. 31 father of his friend Bedford resided at Brixton Cause- way, about four miles on the Surrey side of London ; the smoke of the great city hung heavily beyond an interven- ing breadth of country ; shady lanes led to the neighbour- ing villages; the garden was a sunny solitude where flow- ers 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 him- self at the desk in the garden summer-house; morning after morning quickly passed ; and by the end of six weeks Joan of Air, 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 1*793, 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 chival- ric and mediaeval ; 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 32 SOUTHEY. [chap. 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, 1 V93). Prob- ably 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 tyr- annizing over the weak, man and beast. . . . There is no place for virtue." After this, though Southey did not lose faith in demo- cratic 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 reali- zation 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 pur- pose 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 II.] OXFORD. 33 diligently driving his quill : " I have finished transcribing Joan^ and have bound her in marble paper with green rib- bons, 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 let- ters. 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; tlie 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. Soutli- ey^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 f(^r that of Mr. Hill ; there was the same benign thought- fulness in his aspect, tlie 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 be- come 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, 84 SOUTHEY. [chap. and went through many conflicts of mind, and not a httle anguish. " God knows I would exchange every intellectu- al 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 dis- secting-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 em- ployment 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 warm- er 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 n.] PANTISOCRACY. 35 meeting-time of spirits, they were drawn close to one an- other. 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 loth 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 thev would behold "colonies of indepen- 86 SOUTHEY. [chap. donee in tlie undivided dale of industry.'" All the argu- ments 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 un- published 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 Quak- er, an enthusiast, a poet, married to the sister of Southey's Edith, would surely join them ; so would Burnett, his col- lege 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 val- leys and mountains of Wales. Southey joined his moth- er, 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 es2wit home — was not to hear a breath of Pantisocracy ; still less would it be prudent to confess to her his engage- ment 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 feel- ings relief? When Coleridge, after his Welsh wanderings, arrived in Bristol, he was introduced to Lovell, to Mrs. Lovell, to Mrs. 11] PANTISOORACY. 37 Lovell's sisters, Edith and Sarah, and Martha and Elizahcth. Mrs. Lovell was doubtless ah-eady 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 pan- tisocracy 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. Bur- nett, also a pantisocrat, must also marry. Would Miss Martha Fricker join the community as Mrs. George Bur- nett? 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 notwithstand- ing, 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 friead of Priestley's. But a few days since he had toasted the great doctor at Bala, thereby call- ing forth a sentiment from the loyal parish apothecary : " I gives a sentiment, gemmen ! May all republicans be gullo- teened !" 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/. would do. " He recom- mends the Susquehanna, from its excessive beauty and its security from hostile Indians." The very name — Susque- hanna — sounded as if it were the sweetest of rippling riv- ers. 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 iVth of October, a dark and gusty evening of falling rain and miry ways. Within Aunt Ty- ler's house in College Green, Bristol, a storm was burst- 38 SOUTHEY. [chap. ing ; slie liad 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 swal- lowed a glass of brandy and set oil 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, mind- ful of his fellow-man, dragged him along nine miles amid rain and mire. Then, with Aveary 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 l7th of October, 1794." For a little longer the bow of hope shone in the AVest, 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 pro- posed 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 princi- ples could not be fairly tested under the disadvantage of an effete and adverse social state surrounding them ; be- sides, where was the purchase-money to come from ? how II.] PANTISOCRACY. 39 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 1 50/. ? With such a sum they might both qualify by mar- riage for membership in the pantisocratical community. After that, the rest would somehow follow. How, then, to raise 150/.? 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 nHmporte. I shall write truth, and only truth." The offer, however, turned out to be that of a reporter's place; and his trou- blesome 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 them- selves ; and they could lecture to a Bristol audience. AYith 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 lect- ures — one, A Comjmrative View of the English Rebellion under Charles I. and the French Revolution ; the other, On Revealed Religion : its Corru2ytions 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 recog- nize 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 40 SOUTHEY. [chap. Empire. Soutliey 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 Cot- tle, 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 musings on his divine Susquehanna." The good Cottle — young in 1V95, a publisher, and un- happily 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 sor- rows, 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 Rous- seau. 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 Colli ns's Evening made a fash- ion, 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 pub- lishing 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 in- experienced and as ardent as himself." Cottle offered to publish the poem in quarto, to make it the handsomest II.] PANTISOORACY. 41 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, under- taken 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 pos- sessed : 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 famil- iarity 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 stran- gers ; above all, he looked forward to the joy of again em- bracing his beloved ones : " Often together have we talked of death ; How sw^eet it were to see All doubtful things made clear ; I> 3 42 SOTJTHEY. [chap. How sweet it were witli powers Sucli 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-go- ing 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 for- eign poetry and history, rummage among the books and manuscripts his uncle had collected in Lisbon, and after- wards 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 ex- pected 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 per- suaded him to go ; consented, finally, to all that he pro- posed. 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. Cot- tle 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 II.] MARRIAGE. 43 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 hi? adult spirit. And Coleridge complained of this, and did not come to bid his friend farewell. CHAPTER III. WANDERINGS, 1795 1803. Through pastoral Somerset, tlirough 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 De- cember 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 com- fortless 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 bediz- ened, 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, blood- thirsty 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 east- CHAP. III.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 45 ward began to the sliout of the muleteers and the clink of a hundred bells. Some eighteen days were spent upon the road to Ma- drid. 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 posses- sion 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 moun- tain 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 ap- proaching, and the loud-voiced muleteer consigning his struggling team to Saint Michael and three hundred dev- ils ; and then on to remoter hills, or moor and swamp, or the bridge flung across a ravine, or the path above a preci- pice, 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 abandon- ed castle, or jasper- pillared Moorish gateway and gallery. Nor were the little inns and baiting-houses without com- pensations for their manifold discomforts. The Spanish country-folk were dirty and ignorant, but they had a cour- tesy unknown to English peasants ; Southey would join the group around the kitchen fire, and be, as far as his im- perfect speech allowed, one with the rustics, the carriers, the hostess, the children, the village barber, the familiar priest, and the familiar pigs. When chambermaid Jo- 46 SOUTHEY. [chap. sepha took hold of his hah' 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 perfec- tibility, Southey allowed himself at times to square ac- counts with common-sense by a cynical outbreak ; but, in truth, he was a warm-hearted lover of his kind. Even feu- dalism and Catholicism had not utterly degraded the Span- iard. Southey thanks God that the pride of chivahy 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 ten- der 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, accom- panied 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 his- tory of St. Francis was displayed upon the walls. "Do they believe all this, sir ?" he asked Mr. Hill. " Yes, and III.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 47 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 imagina- tion 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 cour- tiers, 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 fol- lowers of the father of his people numbered seven thou- sand, 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 de- parture, Mr. Ilill 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 impart- ed 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 appear- ance 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 pro- cession attending a body uncovered upon its bier; they 48 SOUTHEY. [chap. left behind the pilgrims to our Lady's Shrine, pious bac- chanals half naked and half drunk, advancing to the tune of bagpipe and drum ; then the gleam of wallers 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 advan- tage 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 Com- munities 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, a,nd 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, m.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 49 the mountains with their streams and coohiess, the odorous gardens, Tagus flashing in the sunhght, the rough bar glit- tering with white breakers, and the Atlantic, made amends. AVhen 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. P>om this elevation the eye stretches over a bare and mel- ancholy country to Lisbon on the one side, and on the other to the distant Convent of Mafra, the Atlantic bound- ing the greater part of the prospect. I never beheld a view that so effectually checked the wish of wandering." " Lisbon, from w hich God grant me a speedy deliver- ance," 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 Tuud-encumbered tide of Avon and a glimpse of British smoke. " I intend to write a hymn," he says, " to the Dii Penates." His joy 3* 60 SOUTHEY. [chap. in reunion with liis 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 Salis- bury, 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 amia- ble but inactive piety : " The widow is calm, and amused with her beautiful infant. V/e are all become more-relig- ious 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 pub- lishing his best pieces, if only enough to buy her a harp- sichord. . . . 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 wan- dered 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 con- tracted 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 narroAV interests ; no man was more deeply moved by the political changes in his ow^n country, by the national uprising in the Spanish peninsula, than Southey. While seated at his desk, his intellect ranged VI.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 51- tlirough 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 mer- chant, Glover, had indeed written an heroic poem contain- ing the correct number- of Books ; its subject was a lofty one ; the sentiments were generous, the language digni- fied ; and inasmuch as Leonidas was a patriot and a Whig, true Whigs and patriots bought and praised the poem. B.-t 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 a longue haleine was dead in English literature. Cowper had given breadth, with a mingled gaiety and gravity, to the poetry of de- scription and sentiment ; Burns had made the air tremu- lous with snatches of pure and thrilling song ; the Lyrical Ballads were not yet. At this moment, from a provin- cial press, /oa?i of Arc was issued. As a piece of roman- tic narrative it belongs to the new age of poetry ; in senti- ment it is revolutionary and republican ; its garment of style is of the eighteenth century. Nowhere, except it be 52 SOUTHEY. • [chap. in the verses which hail "Inoculation, lovely Maid!" does the personified abstraction, galvanized into life by print- er'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 del- egated maid is a creature overflowing with Rousseauish sensibility ; virtue, innocence, the peaceful cot, stand over against the wars and tyranny of kings, and the supersti- tion and cruelty of prelates. Southey himself soon dis- relished 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 instruc- tive 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 contrib- uted some four hundred lines, where Platonic philosophy and protests against the Newtonian hypothesis of aether are not very appropriately brought into connexion with the shepherd -girl of Domremi. These lines disappeared from all editions after the first. ^ ' 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 yes- terday, at Hood's request, in order to mark the lines written by me. III.] WANDERINGS, nos— 1803. 53 The neigbbourliood 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 remamed after these employ- ments he scribbled for The Monthly Magazine, and to good purpose, for m 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 Burger'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 dread- fully affecting; he had also read Schiller's Fiesco. Cole- ridge was just back after a visit to Birmingham, but still I was really astonished — 1, at the schoolboy, wretched allegoric ma- chinery; 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 ivihied cheek huyigpity's cn/stal c/etn ;^ 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." 54 SOUTHEY. [chap. held off from Lis brother-in-law and former friend. A sentence from Schiller, copied on a slip of paper by South- ey, with a word or two of conciliation, was sent to the offended Abdiel of Pantisocracy : " Fiasco ! 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 imulo-iwst-futurum tense; it therefore behoved Southey to proceed with his intended study of the law. By Christmas he would re- ceive the first instalment of an annual allowance of 160/. 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 of- ferings 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 Eobert 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 conscious- ness 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 III.] WANDERINGS, 1705—1803. 55 sounds was in him, though hare-hunting was not an amuse- ment of Southey tlie younger ; he was as little of a sports- man as his friend Sir Thomas More : the only murderous sport, indeed, which Southey ever engaged in w^as 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 Aud thoughts and feelings to be found where'er We breathe beneath the open sky, aud 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, Soutliey 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 com- mit 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 re- tains everything needful to its possessor, and drops every- thing which is mere incumbrance. Every circumstance in the remotest degree connected wutli the seminary of ma- gicians in the Dom Daniel under the roots of the sea ad- hered 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, read- 56 SOUTHEY. [chap. ing law is laborious indolence — it is thrashing straw. . . . I have given all possible attention, and attempted to com- mand 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 sac- rifice of one law-book — my whole proper stock — whom I design to take up to the top of Mount Etna, for the ex- press purpose of throwing him straight to the devil. Huz- za, Grosyenor ! I was once afraid that I should have a dead- ly 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 Hamp- shire under blue skies, and also poetry be written ? South- ey longed to fill his eyesight with the sea, and with sun- sets 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 mid- shipman, 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 Cole- ridge, 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 stur- diest of jovial companions," whose clear head and stout III.] WANDERINGS, 1705— ISo.'i. 57 heart were at Southey's service whenever they were need- ed 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 com- fort. . . . 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 home- sick, 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 ear- lier: 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 trans- lations from the German had previously attracted his no- tice. Norwich, at the end of the last century and the be- ginning of the present, was a little Academe among pro- vincial cities, where the belles-lettres and mutual admira- tion were assiduously cultivated. Southey saw Norwich at its best. Among its " superior people " were several who really deserved something better than that vague dis- tinction. 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 mon- odrame, and introduced the rhymeless measures followed 58 SODTHEY. [chap. by Southey. He rested too soon upon liis well-earned reputation, contented himself with touching- and retouch- ing his verses ; and possessing singularly pleasing manners, abounding information and genial wit, embellished and enjoyed society/ William Taylor, the biographer of Say- ers, was a few years his junior. He was versed in Goethe, in Schiller, in the great Kotzebae — 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 re- venge 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 re- mote as the domestic arrangements of the Chinese Emper- or, 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 ;"" with other blasphemies bor- rowed from the German, and too startling even for ration- alistic 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 dilet- tantism. But solemn Dr. Alderson was here, and was now engaged in giving away his daughter Amelia to a divorced ^ See Southey's article on " Dr. Sayers's Works," Quarterli/ Ec- view, January, 1827. "^ Harriet Murtineau : Autobiography, i. p. 800, iii.J WANDERINGS, IT'.i.")— ISu;;. 50 brideoTOom, the painter Opie. Just now Elizabetli Giimey was listening in the Friends' Meeting-House to that dis- course which transformed her from a gay haunter of coun- try ball-rooms to the sister and servant of Newgate pris- oners. 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 wind- bag, literary, political, or religious, was only over-exquisite. But Harriet Martineau, who honoured courage, purity, faithfulness, and strength wherever they were found, rev- erenced the Tory Churchman, Robert Southey.^ Soon after his return from Norwich, a small house was taken at Westbury (1797), a village two miles distant from liristol. 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 South- ey 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 support- ed — 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 balhids and short pieces which are perhaps more generally known than any other of Southey's writings. He had served his apprenticeship to ' See her " History of the Poaee," R. vi. cliap. xvi. 60 SOUTHEY. [cHAr. the craft and mystery of such verse-making in the Morn- ing Post, earning thereby a guinea a week, but it was not until Bishop Bruno was written at Westbury that he had* the hick to hit off the right tone, as he conceived it, of the modern ballad. The popularity of his Mary the Maid of the Inny 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 goodwill may find him a very genuine little ghost, a stern and sad justicer. AVhat 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 gen- uine as a schoolboy's, is, like a schoolboy's, the reverse of HI.] WAXDERINTtS, 1795—1803. fil keen - edged ; on otlier occasions be expresses simply a strong man's endurance of sorrow ; but more often an un- dertone of gravity appears tbrougb his glee, and in bis sor- row there is something of solemn joy. All this year (1799) Madoc was steadily advancing, and The Destruction of the Dam Daniel had been already sketched in outline. Soutbey was fortnnate 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 be 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 chem- ist, the young everything, the man least ostentatious, of first talent that I have ever known." Soutbey 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 pos- sessed a poet's fine susceptibility, be records that the ni- trous oxide wrought upon him more readily than upon any other of its votaries. "Oh, Tom!" be 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 Soutbey drew inspiration from Davy's air-bag, could Davy do less than lend his ear to Southey's epic i They would stroll back to Martin Hall — so christened because the birds who 62 SOUTHEY. [ciiap. love delicate air built under its eaves their "pendant beds" — and in the large sitting -poom, 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 Deliio-o, for a Greek di'ama^ for a Portuguese trag- ed}', 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 close- ly 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 liim, 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 seem-; ed 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 III.] WANDERINGS, 1 795—1 803. 83 comfort ill " Southey Palace that is to be." Possession was not to be had until Michaelmas, and part of the in- tervening 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 liad been shaped, after tlie 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 im- mediately 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 re- solved 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 jn the logic of Southey's "there- C4 SOUTHEY. [chap. fore;" so excellent an e})ic 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 Ca- pac, but of the Dom Daniel poem which we know as Thala- ha. 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 derelic- tion 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 Eng- lish 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-proj- ect; Mango Capac never descended from his father the Sun to appear in Southey's poem ; Mohammed never emerged from the cavern w^iere 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 constant- ly in view through all his days of toil, was not yet half wrought out when, forty years later, the pen dropped III.-] WANDERINGS, 1795—1808. G5 from liis liand, and the worn-out brain could tliink 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 lieart, and sudden seizures of the head. An entire cliange of scene was ob- viously 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. Ilill invited him ; his good friend Elms- ley, 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 of- ten 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. New- ton, 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 4 66 SOUTHEY. [chap. from Bristol, by Falmoutli, to tbu 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 Gehir^ " written by God knows who." But when the ship lost sight of Eng- land, 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 be- hind 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 flap- ping sail, ran out; they passed thankfully our Lady of the Guide, and soon dropped anchor in the Tagus. An ab- sence of four years had freshened every object to Southey's sense of seeing, and now he had the jo}' of viewing all fa- miliar things as strange through so dear a companion's eyes. III.] WANDERINGS, 1705—1803. fi7 Mr. Hill was presently on board with kindly greeting; he had liired 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 re- ceiving donations on silver salvers. News of an assassina- tion, 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 mar- ket-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 wash- ing in the brook of Alcantara. If the sultry noon in Lis- bon was hard to endure, evening made amends; then strong sea-winds swept the narrowest alley, and rolled their r.8 SOUTHEY. [chap current down cvefy avenue. And later, it was pure con- tent to look down upon the moonlighted river, with Al- mada 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 Eng- lish words as exposing " the naked nonsense of the blas- phemy " — 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, win- dows 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 pain- fully 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 Fix, the Prince. On a broiling Sunday, the amuseinent being cool and de- vout, was celebrated the bull-feast. The first wound sick- ened Edith ; Southey himself, not without an effort, looked on and saw " the death-sweat darkening the dun hide " — a <'ircumstancc borne in mind for his Thalaha. " I am not III.] WANDERINGS, 17i)5— 18U3. 69 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 hio;h time to take refuo-e from the sun among the lemon -groves at Cintra. Here, if ever in his life, Southey for a brief season believed that the grass- hopper 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 pur- ple crocuses carpeted the ground, and there rest and read. Sometimes seated sideways on one of the surefooted bur- ros, 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 ai-my, 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 ever- lasting to-day, and that to-morrow 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 cli- mate seemed to have restored him to health, and he assail- 70 t^UUTHEY. [chap. ed folio after folio in his uncle's library, rising eacli moni- ing at five, " to lay in bricks for the great Pyramid of my history." The chronicles, the laws, the poetry of Portu- gal, 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 soutljern 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 an- other, and another." As with Joan of Arc, so with this maturer poem the correction was a rehaudling which dou- bled the writer's work. To draw the pen across six hun- dred lines did not cost him a pang. At length the manu- script was despatched to his friend Rickman, with instruc- tions 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-ex- pected 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 rivu- lets and ditches, shall flow into the great Madoc Mississip- pi 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 TJialaha; and a nearer one of a 1I1.J WAXDERIXGfc^, 17*.)o — ISU3. 71 Persian story, of wliicli I see the germ of vitality. 1 take the system of the Zendavesta for my mythology, and in- troduce the powers of darkness persecuting a Persian, one of the hundred and fifty sons of the great king ; an Athe- nian captive is a prominent character, and the whole war- fare 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, en- countering 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 mo- ments of emotion in that venerable city ; but air and ex- ercise 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 ai)pFoach in a worthy spirit that most affecting mon- ument 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. Cer- tainly her dwelling-house was in the adjoining garden ; and from there she was dragged, to be murdered at the feet of the king, her falhcr-in-law. , . . I, who have long 72 SOUTHEY. [chap. 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 gowns- men gathered round ; the visitors were travx4-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 " impu- dent 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 re- turn 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 remind- ing Southey that Bristol had recently lost the miraculous young man, Davy, and adding that he, Samuel Taylor Cole- ridge, had experiences, sufferings, hopes, projects to im- part, which would beguile much time, " were you on a desert island and I your Fridai/,^^ 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 con- venience — and when I mention the name of Words- worth, for society of men of intellect — I know no place. III.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 73 in which you and Edith would find yourselves so well suited." Meanwhile Drummond, an M.P. and a translator of Per- sius, who was going as ambassador, first to Palermo and then to Constantinople, was on the look-out for a secre- tary. 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/. a year? Such possibilities, however, could not prevent him from speedily visiting Coleridge and Keswick. " Time and ab- sence 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 dis- appointment, but certainly of remoteness from this north- ern 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 I 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 F 4* 74 SOUTHEY. [chap. soul. "The Dee is broad and shallow, and its dark wa- ters 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 Excheq- uer 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, ac- cepted the appointment, hastened back to Keswick, bade farewell for a little while to his wife, and started for Dub- lin 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 humor- ous-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 con- III.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 75 ceive the average Teagne or Patrick otherwise than as a potato-devouring troglodyte, on occasions grotesquely ami- able, 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 re- building 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 pub- lished 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; some- times kicketh his heels in the antechamber; . . . some- times a gracious message emancipates him for the day. Secrecy hath been enjoined him as to these State proceed- ings. On three subjects he is directed to read and re- 76 i^OUTHEY. [chap. search — corn-laws, finance, tythes, according to their writ- ten 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 liis 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 no- tions of competence were moderate ; the vagabondage be- tween 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 anoth- er 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, ilic 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. HI. J WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 77 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 manu- script 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 togeth- er 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 in- vite him. He had books enough in England to employ three years of active industry. And underlying all thoughts of the great Constable Nuno Alvares Pereyra, of the King D. JoaO L, 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 al- ready 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 com- monplace phraseology of endearment, a worthy child a'>l 78 SOUTHEY. [chap. a most excellent cliaracter. She loves iile 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 pain- ful to see how dreams disturb her." For Margery and lier mother and the folios a liabitation must be found. Southey inclined now towards settling in the neighbour- hood of London — now towards Norwich, where Dr. Sayers and William Taylor w^ould 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 Mai'gery 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 sev- en childless years — and what had grown so dear. But Southey's heart was strong; he drew himself together, re- turned 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," wTites 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 Cole- ridge and her baby cooings caused shootings of pain on which Southey had not counted. W"as the experiment of iii.J . WA^"DERI2sGS, 1795— ISUo. 79 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 South ey was yet to come ; but in what remains there are few outstanding events to chroni- cle ; there is nowhere any splendour of circumstance. Of some lives the virtue is distilled, as it were, into a few ex- quisite moments — moments of rapture, of vision, of sud- den 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 some- what 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 un- falteringly : 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 inde- fatigable eye ran down the long folio columns, and the in- defatigable hand still held the pen — until all true life had ceased. When it has been said that Southey was appoint- rnAP.iv.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1808—1889. 81" ed Pye's successor in the laureateship, that he received an honorary degree from liis 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 when we add that he wrote and published books, the lead- ing facts of Southey's life have been told. Had he been a 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 Lo- dore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of Borrow- dale. 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 earth- ly 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 ante- 8^ SOUTHEY. [chap. chamber to tlie tumb. The rambling tenement consisted of two houses under one roof, the larger part being occu- pied 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 daugh- ter. "A few steps farther," wi-ites Sara Coleridge, whose description is here given in abiidgment, " was a little wing bedroom — then the study, where my uncle sat all day oc- cupied 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 win- dows, a lai'ge one looking down upon the green with the wide flower-border, and over to Keswick Lake and moun- tains beyond. There were two smaller windows looking towards the lower part of the town seen beyond the nurs- ery-garden. The room was lined with books in fine bind- ings ; there were books also in brackets, elegantly lettered vellnm- 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 propor- tions, this was a charming room." Hard by the study was Southev's bedroom. AVe need not ramble farther IV.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1830. 83 througli passages lined with books, and up and down flights of stairs to Mr. Jackson's organ -room, and Mrs. LovelFs room, and Hartley's parlour, and the nurseries, and the dark apple-room supposed to be the abode of a bogle. AVithout, 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 dim- pling water. " Dear Greta Hall I" 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 imagina- tion, 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 -)»ound 84 SOCTHEY. [chap. quartos iniglit be sought and found, Flanders, on the whole, gave Southey deeper and stronger feelings than did Switz- erland. 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 Church- yard, 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 weaken- ing." Some of the delights of southern counties he miss- ed ; 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 observ- ance ; to this the mountains hardly condescend, but they shower at their will a sudden largess of unimagined beau- ty. Southey would sally out for a constitutional at his I V.J • WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 85 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 exer- cise, 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 splen- dours, visionary glories, exaltations, terrors, are momentari- ly possible where mountain, and cloud, and wind, and sun- shine 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 inter- est 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 medita- tion ; their beauty has in an especial degree passed into his verse. When his sailor brother Thomas came and set- tled in the Vale of Newlands, Southey would quickly cov- er the ground from Kesw ick at his four-mile pace, and in the beck at the bottom of Tom's fields, on summer days, he would plunge and ro-[)lungo and act the river-god in the natural seats of mossv stone Or he would be over- 86 SOUTHEY. [chap. powered some autumn inoriung by the clamour of childish voices voting a holiday by acclamation. Their father must accompany thein ; 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 tlie scramble be? To Skiddaw Dod, or Causey Pike, or Watenlath, or, as a compromise between their exuberant activity and his incUnation for the chair and the fireside, to Walla Crag? And there, while his young companions opened their bas- kets 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 over- keen desire the gurgling tanks and fountains of Cintra, his Paradise of early manhood.* 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 iu the carcanet." Then, as Wordsworth has said, the atmosphere seems re- fined, and the sky rendered more crystalline, as the vivify- ing heat of the year abates ; the lights and shadows are more delicate ; the colouring is richer and more finely ^ For Westall's drawing, and the description of Walla Crag, see " Sir Thomas More •/' Colloquy VI, IV.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 180U— 1839. 87 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 gi-eatness 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 mar- vellous 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 goi'Q.gs on under a clear sky ; but at other seasons there is such shifting of shades, such islands of light, such columns and buttresses of sun- shine, 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. Maria Santissima ! Mount Horeb, with the glory upon its sum- mit, might have been more glorious, but not more beauti- ful 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 thou- sand 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 88 SOUTHEY. [chap. 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 de- scribes the goings on under an autumn sky : — " The moun- tains 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 un- natural 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. Some- times 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 soli- tude of his ramble was unbroken ; he never had the knack of forgathering with chance acquaintance. With intellect- ual 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 short- ness of sight, fell in with this infirmity. He would not patronize his humbler neighbours; he had a kind of imag- inative jealousy on behalf of their rights as independent persons ; and he could not be sure of straightway discover- ing, by any genius or instinct of good-fellowship, that com- mon ground whereon strangers are at home with one an- IV.] WAYS OF LIVE AT KESWICK, 180:^—1880. 80 other. 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 mechan- ically 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 scare- crow "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 hon- est 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 South- ey's sympathies, he was sure to meet a neighbourly re- sponse. 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 Cumber- land 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 G 5 UO SOUTHEY. [chap. and mariners were full of a strong and sweet hilarity ; and the home circle was in itself a considerable group of per- sons. 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 per- petually 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 an- swering 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, ' ex- quisitely wild,' an utter visionary, like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle of hh 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 ex- pressed surprise that Hartley should take his pleasure of wheel-bari'ow-riding so sadly, " The pity is" — explained lit- tle Job — " the pity is, Fse always thinking of my thoughts." " ' I'm a boy of a very religious turn,' he says ; for he al- ways talks of himself and examines his own character, just IV.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, ISUo— ISS'J. 91 as if he were speaking of another person, and as inipai- tially. 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 Team under Southey's roof. But when the pale-faced wanderer returned from Italy, he sur- prised 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 fa- ther," 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 motlier 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 con- science 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 " ncpotious " uncle is 02 SOUTHEV. [chap. 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 thankful- ness possessed the little one's father; but when the Arc- tic 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. Sputhey 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 Quin- cey — returned after a short absence to Greta Hall, she saw lier 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 love- liness of youthful womanhood may turn to Wordsworth's IV.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1889. 93 poem, The Triads where she appears first of the three " sis- ter nymphs " of Keswick and Rydal ; or, Hartley Cole- ridge'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, aud 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 carry- ing on the most cherished purpose of his life — the Histo- ry 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 subuiit to, I must be content to stay in England, :is on my jiart it certainly is not worth 04 SOUTHEY. [chap. while to sacrifice a year's happiness ; for though not unhap- py (my mind is too active and too well disciplined to yield to any such criminal weakness), still, without you I am not liappy. But for your sake as well as my own, and for little Edith's sake, I will not consent to any separation ; tlie 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 valua- ble 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 sing- ing 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 re- peated 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 sufi'used in grief When I have said that with autumnal grey Thfe touch of old hath mark'd thy fathers 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. Einma, the quietest of infants, whose voice IV.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 95 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 live 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 w-as Isabel ; the most passionately loved was Herbert. " My other two are the most perfect contrast you ever saw. Bertha, whom I call Qiieen 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 playfel- lows, 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 hnvs. Among the fragments at the end of The Doc- tor will be found a Chronicle History of the Cattery of Cat's Eden ; and some of Southey's frolic letters are writ- ten 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 Ma- dame Bianchi, a beautiful and singular creature, white, with 96 SOUTHEY. [cHAi. 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 Piilcheria 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 misera- bly. At last Fortune, as if to make amends for her un- kindness, 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 Arch- duke Rumpelstilzchen), and the equally-to-be-praised Hur- ly-burly buss. 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 deli- cate task," he wrote in the Quarterly Revievj^ " 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 lit- erature 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. Ab- solutely dependent on his pen he was at no time. His generous friend Wynn, upon coming of age, allowed him annually 160/., until, in 1807, he was able to procure for Southey a Government pension for literary services amount- IV.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 18o;]— 1839. 97 ing, clear of taxes, to nearly the same sum. Soutlie\ had as truly as any man the pride of independence, but he had none of its vanity ; there was no humiliation in acceptino- a service from one whom friendship had made as close as a brother. Men, he says, are as much better foi- the j^ood 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 iny voy- age." 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 sis- ters 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." 08 SOUTHEY. [chap. 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 dili- gent 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 real- ized, would make but a poor return to the household cof- fer. To gain time and a vantage-ground for these, he was content to yield much of his strength to work of tempo- rary 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 ar- rived from the Annual Review, he groaned in spirit over IV.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. O'.t 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 Grosveoor 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 Gifl^ord 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 writ- ten, 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 dis- missed 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 Si. lis. Id. On the oth- er hand, for his N'avfd Bioyrnphy, which interested him 100 SOUTHEY. [cHAf less than most of his works, and which was uiidertakeri 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 Revieio — for an important article he would receive lOOZ. — he never had a year's income in ad- vance until that year, late in his life, in which Sir Robert Peel offered him a baronetcy. In 1818, the lucky pay- ment of a bad debt enabled him to buy 300/. in the Three-per-cents. " I have 1 00/. already there," he writes, "and shall then be worth 12/. per annum." By 1821 this sum had grown to 625/., the gatherings of half a life-time. In that year his friend John May, whose ac- quaintance he had made in Portugal, and to whose kind- ness he was a debto4', 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/. 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, mediaeval ivories, engravings by the Little Masters, Chippendale cabinets, did not excite pining desire in Sonthey's breast; yet in one direction he indulged the passion of a collector. If, with respect to IV.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 18(»:^ — 18o'.«. loi any of " the things independent of the will," he showed a want of moderation unworthy of his discipleship to Epic- tetus, it was assuredly with respect to books. Before he possessed a fixed home, he was already moored to his fo- Hos; and w4ien once he was fairly settled at Keswick, many a time the carriers on the London road found their lading 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 ar- rived 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 hon- est; but if Dirk Hatteraick had run ashore a hundred- weight of the Acta Sanctorum duty-free, the king's laure- ate 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 (rreta Hall. "We main- tain 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 com- modity of matter, but only for God's first creature, which was Ugkty 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 Sonthey's ColloqideSy " with these books and the 1<»2 SOUTHEY. [chap. delight you take in their constant society, what have you to covet or desire ?" " Nothing," is the answer, *' . . . ex- cept 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 me- tropolis of the North, was an opportunity of arraying him- self 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 learn- ing 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 cher- ished 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 fig- ure, the rapid stride, the quick-seeing eye, the eager fin- gers. 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 hon- our letters, and had he not 300,000 volumes from which to choose? If in a moment of prudential weakness one IV.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 180^—18:39. 1(»8 failed to carry off such a treasure as the Monumenta Boi- ca 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 arc in the Row, think ill of John Mur- ray, 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." x\nd when the bill of lading, coming slow ,but sure, announced that saints and chron- iclers 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 Lander ships from some Italian port a chest containing treasures of less dubious vahie than the Raffaelles and Leonardos, with which he lib- 104 SOUTHEY. [chap. crally 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-pagQ and colophon ; of growing familiarity ; of trac- ing 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 ar- ranging 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 fa- ther'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 ar\y 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 remark- able gathering of such books in the possession of any private person in this country. It included several man- uscripts, some of which were displayed with due distinc- tion 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 po- sitions pyramid - wise. Southey himself had learned the mystery of book-binding, and from him his daughters ac- quired 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 IV.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1808—1839. Iu5 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 vol- umes, 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 dis- play, however much the pride of the eye might be gratified in beholding them ; they were on actual service. Gener- ations 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 Cxhent. 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 L>amiam de Goes; and yonder General History of Spain, by Esteban de Garibay, are signed by their respective au- thors. . . . This Copy of Casaubon's Epistles was sent to me from Florence by Walter Landor. He had perused it 106 SOUTHEY. [chap. carefully, and to that perusal we are indebted for one of the most pleasing of his Conversations. . . . Here is a book with which Lauderdale aniused himself, when Cromwell kept him in prison in Windsor Castle. . . . Here I possess these gathered treasures of time, the harvest of many gen- erations, 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 Thom- as questions, " Has it proved to you ' vexation of spirit ' also?" the Cumberland mountain-dweller breaks forth: " Oh no 1 for never can any man's life have been passed more in accord with his own inclinations, nor more an- swerably 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 be- holden, 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 en- joys 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 in- evitable 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 ac- IV.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 18U3— 1839. 101 quired his method. On a slip of paper which served as marker he would note the pages to which he needed to re- turn. 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 pas- sages 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 /ifMjUj^»^pf;h"A^ ^m^m^tmm >AA\aA- mm^m. MiMitMm wmMmmmm mf' 'f\r^^^r^^\rsrsrs A A r -" Aa aNAW »^ ! cSXaTa^^^a^^aa:?,-^^,: ;*; \« . a . ^-A R 5466 D6 887 opy 1