own

double-deep in his library, and running over into hall and parlor and corridors; loved, too, the children's voices that were around him there- not his own only, but those always next, and almost his - those of the young Coleridges. These were stranded there, with their mother (sister of Mrs. Southey), owing to the rueful neglect of their father- the bard and metaphysician. I do not think this neglect was due wholly to indifference. Coleridge sidled away from his wife and left her at Keswick in that old home of his own,-where he knew care was good-afraid to encounter her clear, honest, discerning — though unsympathetic - eyes, while he was putting all resources and all subterfuges to the feeding of that opiate craze which had fastened its wolfish fangs upon his very soul.

And Southey had most tender and beautiful care for those half-discarded children of the "Ancient Mariner." He writes in this playful vein to young Hartley (then aged eleven), who is away on a short visit:

"Mr. Jackson has bought a cow, but he has had no calf since you left him. Edith [his own daughter] grows like

SOUTHEY WITH CHILDREN.

9

a young giantess, and has a disposition to bite her arm, which you know is a very foolish trick. Your [puppy] friend Dapper, who is, I believe, your God-dog, is in good health, though he grows every summer graver than the last. I am desired to send you as much love as can be enclosed in a letter. I hope it will not be charged double on that account at the post-office. But there is Mrs. Wilson's love, Mr. Jackson's, your Aunt Southey's, your Aunt Lovell's and Edith's; with a purr from Bona Marietta [the cat], an open-mouthed kiss from Herbert [the baby], and three wags of the tail from Dapper. I trust they will all arrive safe. Yr. dutiful uncle."

And the same playful humor, and disposition to evoke open-eyed wonderment, runs up and down the lines of that old story of Bishop Hatto and the rats; and that other smart slap at the barbarities of war which young people know, or ought to know, as the "Battle of Blenheim "- wherein

old Kaspar says,—

"it was a shocking sight

After the field was won;

For many thousand bodies here

Lay rotting in the sun.

But things like that, you know, must be,

After a famous Victory.

Great praise the Duke of Marlboro' won

And our good Prince Eugene;

'Why, 'twas a very wicked thing!'

Said little Wilhelmine.

Nay-nay--my little girl,' quoth he,

'It was a famous Victory.'”

There

Almost everybody has encountered these Southeyan verses, and that other, about Mary the "Maid of the Inn," in some one or other of the many "collections" of drifting poetry. are very few, too, who have not, some day, read that most engaging little biography of Admiral Nelson, which tells, in most straightforward and simple and natural way, the romantic story of a life full of heroism, and scored with stains. I do not know, but with most people-a surer and more lasting memory of Southey would be cherished by reason of those unpretending writings already named, and by knowledge of his quiet, orderly, idyllic home-life among the Lakes of Cumberland -tenderly and wisely provident of the mixed household committed to his care-than by the more ambitious things he did, or by the louder life he lived in the controversialism and politics of the day.

His Early Life.

To judge him more nearly we must give a slight trace of his history. Born down in Bristol (in whose neighborhood we found, you will remember, Chatterton, Mistress More, Coleridge, and others) he was the son of a broken down linendraper, who could help him little; but a great aunt—a starched woman of the Betsey Trotwood stamp could and did befriend him, until it came to her knowledge, on a sudden, that he was plotting emigration to the Susquehanna, and plotting marriage with a dowerless girl of Bristol ; then she dropped him, and the guardian aunt appears nevermore.

An uncle, however, who is a chaplain in the British service, helps him to Oxford - would have had him take orders-in which case we should have had, of a certainty, some day, Bishop Southey; and probably a very good one. But he has some scruples about the Creed, being overweighted, perhaps, by intercourse with young Coleridge on the side of Unitarianism: "Every

atom of grass," he says, "is worth all the Fathers."* He, however, accompanies the uncle to Portugal; dreams dreams and has poetic visions there in the orange-groves of Cintra; projects, too, a History of Portugal — which project unfortunately never comes to fulfilment. He falls in with the United States Minister, General Humphreys, who brings to his notice Dwight's "Conquest of Canaan," which Southey is good enough to think "has some merit."

a

Thereafter he comes back to his young wife; is much in London and thereabout; coming to know Charles Lamb, Rogers, and Moore, with other such. He is described at that day as tall most presentable man with dark hair and eyes, wonderful arched brows; "head of a poet," Byron said; looking up and off, with proud foretaste of the victories he will win; he has, too, very early, made bold literary thrust at that old story of Joan of Arc: a good topic, of large human interest, but not over successfully dealt with by him. After this came that extraordinary poem of

*Letter to Bedford, under date of December, 1793.Life and Correspondence, p. 69.