our voices. Landor had this: so had Coleridge. Southey never would have run away from his wife -never; he might dislike her; but Society's great harness (if nothing more) would hold him in check; there were conditions under which Coleridge might and did. Southey would never overdrink or over-tipple; there were conditions (not rare) under which Coleridge might and did. Yet, for all this, I can imagine a something finer in the poet of the Ancient Mariner that felt moral chafings far more cruelly; and for real poetic unction you might put Thalaba, and Kehama, and Madoc all in one scale, and only Christabel in the other and the Southey poems would be

bounced out of sight. But how many poets of the century can put a touch to verse like the touch in Christabel?

The Doctor and Last Shadows.

I cannot forbear allusion to that curious book little read now-which was published by Southey anonymously, called The Doctor: a book show

*The sixth and seventh volumes appeared after the poet's death, in 1847.

ing vast accumulation of out-of-the-way bits of learning-full of quips, and conceits, and oddities; there are traces of Sterne in it and of Rabelais; but there is little trenchant humor of its own. It is a literary jungle; and all its wit sparkles like marsh fire-flies that lead no whither. You may wonder at its erudition; wonder at its spurts of meditative wisdom; wonder at its touches of scholastic cleverness, and its want of any effective coherence, but you wonder more at its waste of power. Yet he had great pride in this book; believed it would be read admiringly long after him; enjoyed vastly a boyish dalliance if not a lying by-play-with the secret of its authorship; but he was, I think, greatly aggrieved by its want of the brilliant success he had hoped for.

But sorrows of a more grievous sort were dawning on him. On the very year before the publication of the first volumes of The Doctor, he writes to his old friend, Bedford: "I have been parted from my wife by something worse than death. Forty years she has been the life of my life; and I have left her this day in a lunatic asylum.'

But she comes back within a year-quiet, but all beclouded; looking vacantly upon the faces of the household, saddened, and much thinned now. For the oldest boy Herbert is dead years since; and the daughter, Isabel, "the most radiant creature (he says) that I ever beheld, or shall behold "

- dead too; his favorite niece, Sara Coleridge, married and gone; his daughter Edith, married and gone; and now that other Edith his wife

-looking with an idle stare around the almost empty house. It was at this juncture, when all but courage seemed taken from him, that Sir Robert Peel wrote, offering the poet a Baronetcy; but he was beyond taking heart from any such toy as this. He must have felt a grim complacency-now that his hair was white and his shoulders bowed by weight of years and toil, and his home so nearly desolate in refusing the empty bauble which Royalty offered, and in staying-plain Robert Southey.

Presently thereafter his wife died; and he, whose life had been such a domestic one, strayed round the house purposeless, like a wheel spinning blindly off from its axle. Friends, however,

SECOND MARRIAGE.

23

took him away with them to Paris; among these friends — that always buoyant and companionable

Crabb Robinson, whose diary is so rich in reminiscences of the literary men of these times. Southey's son Cuthbert went with him, and the poet made a good mock of enjoying the new scenes; plotted great work again-did labor heartily on his return, and two years thereafter committed the indiscretion of marrying again: the loneliness at Keswick was so great. new mistress he had long known and esteemed; and she (Miss Caroline Bowles) was an excellent, kindly, judicious woman—although a poetess.

The

But it was never a festive house again. All the high lights in that home picture which was set between Skiddaw and the Derwent-water were blurred. Wordsworth, striding across the hills by Dunmail Rise, on one of his rare visits, reports that Southey is all distraught; can talk of nothing but his books; and presently-counting only by months that he will not even talk of these

it appears

will talk of nothing. His hand-writ

ing, which had been neat- of which he had been proud - went all awry in a great scrawl obliquely

athwart the page. For a year or two he is in this lost trail; mumbling, but not talking; seeing things yet as one who sees not; clinging to those loved books of his fondling them; passing up and down the library to find this or the other volume that had been carefully cherished taking them from their shelves; putting his lips to them- then replacing them ;- a year or more of this automatic life-the light in him all quenched.

He died in 1843, and was buried in the pretty church-yard of Crosthwaite, a short mile away from his old home. Within the church is a beautiful recumbent figure of the poet, which every traveller should see.

Crabb Robinson.

I had occasion to name Crabb Robinson * as one of the party accompanying Southey on his last visit to the Continent. Robinson was a man whom it is well to know something of, by reason

* Henry Crabb Robinson, b. 1775; d. 1867. Diary, Reminiscences, etc. (ed. by Sadler), 1869.