'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 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.

SOUTHEY.

II

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."

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

a

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.

SOUTHEY'S POEMS.

13

Thalaba, the first of a triad of poems which excited great literary wonderment (the others being the Curse of Kehama and Madoc). They are

rarely heard of now and scarcely known. Beyond that fragment from Kehama, beginning

"They sin who tell us Love can die,"

hardly a page from either has drifted from the high sea of letters into those sheltered bays where the makers of anthologies ply their trade. Yet no weak man could have written either one of these almost forgotten poems of Southey; recondite learning makes its pulse felt in them; bright fancies blaze almost blindingly here and there; old myths of Arabia and Welsh fables are galvanized and brought to life, and set off with special knowledge and cumbrous aids of stilted and redundant prosody; but all is utterly remote from human sympathies, and all as cold-however it may attract by its glitter as the dead hand

"Shrivelled, and dry, and black,”

which holds the magic taper in the Dom Daniel cavern of Thalaba.

A fourth long poem-written much later in life-Roderick the Goth, has a more substantial basis of human story, and so makes larger appeal to popular interest; but it had never a marked

success.

Meantime, Southey has not kept closely by London; there have been peregrinations, and huntings for a home-for children and books must have a settlement. Through friends of influence he had come to a fairly good political appointment in Ireland, but has no love for the bulls and blunderbusses which adorn life there; nor will he tutor his patron's boys — which also comes into the scale of his duties-so gives up that chance of a livelihood. There is, too, a new trip to Portugal with his wife; and a new reverent and dreamy listening to the rustle of the shining leaves of the orange-trees of Cintra. I do not think those murmurous tales of the trees of Portugal, burdened with old monastic flavors, ever went out of his ears wholly till he died. But finally the poet does come to settlement, somewhere about 1803-in that Keswick home, where we found him at the opening of our chapter.