“The genial influencesAnd thoughts and feelings to be found where’erWe breathe beneath the open sky, and seeEarth’s liberal bosom.”
“The genial influencesAnd thoughts and feelings to be found where’erWe breathe beneath the open sky, and seeEarth’s liberal bosom.”
“The genial influences
And thoughts and feelings to be found where’er
We breathe beneath the open sky, and see
Earth’s liberal bosom.”
To London, however, he would go, and would read nine hours a day at law. Although he pleaded at times against his intended profession, Southey really made a strenuous effort to overcome his repugnance to legal studies, and for a while Blackstone andMadocseemed to advance side by side. But the bent of his nature was strong. “I commit wilful murder on my own intellect,” he writes, two years later, “by drudging at law.” And the worst or the best of it was that all his drudgery was useless. Southey’s memory was of that serviceable, sieve-like kind which regains everything needful to its possessor, and drops everything which is mere incumbrance. Every circumstance in the remotest degree connected with the seminary of magicians in the Dom Daniel under the roots of the sea adhered to his memory, but how to proceed in the Court of Common Pleas was always just forgotten since yesterday. “I am not indolent; I loathe indolence; but, indeed, readinglaw is laborious indolence—it is thrashing straw.... I have given all possible attention, and attempted to command volition; ... close the book and all was gone.” In 1801 there was a chance of Southey’s visiting Sicily as secretary to some Italian Legation. “It is unfortunate,” he writes to Bedford, “that you cannot come to the sacrifice of one law-book—my whole proper stock—whom I design to take up to the top of Mount Etna, for the express purpose of throwing him straight to the devil. Huzza, Grosvenor! I was once afraid that I should have a deadly deal of law to forget whenever I had done with it; but my brains, God bless them, never received any, and I am as ignorant as heart could wish. The tares would not grow.”
As spring advanced, impatience quickened within him; the craving for a lonely place in sight of something green became too strong. Why might not law be read in Hampshire under blue skies, and also poetry be written? Southey longed to fill his eyesight with the sea, and with sunsets over the sea; he longed to renew that delicious shock of plunging in salt waves which he had last enjoyed in the Atlantic at the foot of the glorious Arrabida mountain. Lodgings were found at Burton, near Christ Church (1797); and here took place a little Southey family-gathering, for his mother joined them, and his brother Tom, the midshipman, just released from a French prison. Here, too, came Cottle, and there were talks about the new volume of shorter poems. Here came Lloyd, the friend of Coleridge, himself a writer of verse; and with Lloyd came Lamb, the play of whose letters show that he found in Southey not only a fellow-lover of quaint books, but also a ready smiler at quips and cranks and twinklings of sly absurdity. And here he found John Rickman, “the sturdiest of jovial companions,” whose clear head and stoutheart were at Southey’s service whenever they were needed through all the future years.
When the holiday at Burton was at an end Southey had for a time no fixed abode. He is now to be seen roaming over the cliffs by the Avon, and now casting a glance across some book-stall near Gray’s Inn. In these and subsequent visits to London he was wistful for home, and eager to hasten back. “At last, my dear Edith, I sit down to write to you in quiet and something like comfort.... My morning has been spent pleasantly, for it has been spent alone in the library; the hours so employed pass rapidly enough, but I grow more and more homesick, like a spoilt child. On the 29th you may expect me. Term opens on the 26th. After eating my third dinner, I can drive to the mail, and thirteen shillings will be well bestowed in bringing me home four-and-twenty hours earlier: it is not above sixpence an hour, Edith, and I would gladly purchase an hour at home now at a much higher price.”
A visit to Norwich (1798) was pleasant and useful, as widening the circle of his literary friends. Here Southey obtained an introduction to William Taylor, whose translations from the German had previously attracted his notice. Norwich, at the end of the last century and the beginning of the present, was a little Academe among provincial cities, where thebelles-lettresand mutual admiration were assiduously cultivated. Southey saw Norwich at its best. Among its “superior people” were several who really deserved something better than that vague distinction. Chief among them was Dr. Sayers, whom the German critics compared to Gray, who had handled the Norse mythology in poetry, who created the English monodrame, and introduced the rhymeless measures followedby Southey. He rested too soon upon his well-earned reputation, contented himself with touching and retouching his verses; and possessing singularly pleasing manners, abounding information and genial wit, embellished and enjoyed society.[4]William Taylor, the biographer of Sayers, was a few years his junior. He was versed in Goethe, in Schiller, in the great Kotzebue—Shakspeare’s immediate successor, in Klopstock, in the fantastic ballad, in the new criticism, and all this at a time when German characters were as undecipherable to most Englishmen as Assyrian arrow-heads. The whirligig of time brought an odd revenge when Carlyle, thirty years later, hailed in Taylor the first example of “the natural-born English Philistine.” In Norwich he was known as a model of filial virtue, a rising light of that illuminated city, a man whose extraordinary range pointed him out as the fit and proper person to be interrogated by any blue-stocking lady upon topics as remote as the domestic arrangements of the Chinese Emperor, Chim-Cham-Chow. William Taylor had a command of new and mysterious words: he shone in paradox, and would make ladies aghast by “defences of suicide, avowals that snuff alone had rescued him from it; information, given as certain, that ‘God save the King’ was sung by Jeremiah in the Temple of Solomon;”[5]with other blasphemies borrowed from the German, and too startling even for rationalistic Norwich. Dr. Enfield, from whoseSpeakerour fathers learnt to recite “My name is Norval,” was no longer living; he had just departed in the odour of dilettantism. But solemn Dr. Alderson was here, and was now engaged in giving away his daughter Amelia to a divorcedbridegroom, the painter Opie. Just now Elizabeth Gurney was listening in the Friends’ Meeting-House to that discourse which transformed her from a gay haunter of country ball-rooms to the sister and servant of Newgate prisoners. The Martineaus also were of Norwich, and upon subsequent visits the author ofThalabaandKehamawas scrutinized by the keen eyes of a little girl—not born at the date of his first visit—who smiled somewhat too early and somewhat too maliciously at the airs and affectations of her native town, and whose pleasure in pricking a windbag, literary, political, or religious, was only over-exquisite. But Harriet Martineau, who honoured courage, purity, faithfulness, and strength wherever they were found, reverenced the Tory Churchman, Robert Southey.[6]
Soon after his return from Norwich, a small house was taken at Westbury (1797), a village two miles distant from Bristol. During twelve happy months this continued to be Southey’s home. “I never before or since,” he says in one of the prefaces to his collected poems, “produced so much poetry in the same space of time.” William Taylor, by talks about Voss and the German idylls, had set Southey thinking of a series of English Eclogues; Taylor also expressed his wonder that some one of our poets had not undertaken what the French and Germans so long supported—an Almanack of the Muses, or Annual Anthology of minor poems by various writers. The suggestion was well received by Southey, who became editor of such annual volumes for the years 1799 and 1800. At this period were produced many of the ballads and short pieces which are perhaps more generally known than any other of Southey’s writings. He had served his apprenticeship tothe craft and mystery of such verse-making in theMorning Post, earning thereby a guinea a week, but it was not untilBishop Brunowas written at Westbury that he had the luck to hit off the right tone, as he conceived it, of the modern ballad. The popularity of hisMary the Maid of the Inn, which unhappy children got by heart, and which some one even dramatized, was an affliction to its author, for he would rather have been remembered as a ballad writer in connexion withRudigerandLord 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 inLord Williamshone upon by a sudden moonbeam, and surrounded by the welter of waves, is more than a picturesque apparition; readers of good-will may find him a very genuine little ghost, a stern and sad justicer. What has been named “the lyrical cry” is hard to find in any of Southey’s shorter poems. InRoderickand elsewhere he takes delight in representing great moments of life when fates are decided; but such moments are usually represented as eminences on which will and passion wrestle in a mortal embrace, and if the cry of passion be heard, it is often a half-stifled death cry. The best of Southey’s shorter poems, expressing personal feelings, are those which sum up the virtue spread over seasons of life and long habitual moods. Sometimes he is simply sportive, as a serious man released from thought and toil may be, and at such times the sportiveness, while genuine as a schoolboy’s, is, like a schoolboy’s, the reverse ofkeen-edged; on other occasions he expresses simply a strong man’s endurance of sorrow; but more often an undertone of gravity appears through his glee, and in his sorrow there is something of solemn joy.
All this year (1799)Madocwas steadily advancing, andThe Destruction of the Dom Danielhad been already sketched in outline. Southey was fortunate in finding an admirable listener. The Pneumatic Institution, established in Bristol by Dr. Beddoes, was now under the care of a youth lately an apothecary’s apprentice at Penzance, a poet, but still more a philosopher, “a miraculous young man.” “He is not yet twenty-one, nor has he applied to chemistry more than eighteen months, but he has advanced with such seven-leagued strides as to overtake everybody. His name is Davy”—Humphry Davy—“the young chemist, the young everything, the man least ostentatious, of first talent that I have ever known.” Southey would walk across from Westbury, an easy walk over beautiful ground, to breathe Davy’s wonder-working gas, “which excites all possible mental and muscular energy, and induces almost a delirium of pleasurable sensations without any subsequent dejection.” Pleased to find scientific proof that he possessed a poet’s fine susceptibility, he records that the nitrous oxide wrought upon him more readily than upon any other of its votaries. “Oh, Tom!” he exclaims, gasping and ebullient—“oh, Tom! such a gas has Davy discovered, the gaseous oxyde!... Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name. I am going for more this evening; it makes one strong, and so happy! so gloriously happy!... Oh, excellent air-bag!” If Southey drew inspiration from Davy’s air-bag, could Davy do less than lend his ear to Southey’s epic? They would stroll back to Martin Hall—so christened because the birds wholove delicate air built under its eaves their “pendant beds”—and in the large sitting-room, its recesses stored with books, or seated near the currant-bushes in the garden, the tenant of Martin Hall would read aloud of Urien and Madoc and Cadwallon. When Davy had said good-bye, Southey would sit long in the window open to the west, poring on the fading glories of sunset, while about him the dew was cool, and the swallows’ tiny shrieks of glee grew less frequent, until all was hushed and another day was done. And sometimes he would muse how all things that he needed for utter happiness were here—all things—and then would rise an ardent desire—except a child.
Martin Hall was unhappily held on no long lease; its owner now required possession, and the Southeys, with their household gods, had reluctantly to bid it farewell. Another trouble, and a more formidable one, at the same time threatened. What with Annual Anthologies, Madoc in Wales, Madoc in Aztlan, the design for a great poem on the Deluge, for a Greek drama, for a Portuguese tragedy, for a martyrdom play of the reign of Queen Mary—what with reading Spanish, learning Dutch, translating and reviewing for the booksellers—Southey had been too closely at work. His heart began to take fits of sudden and violent pulsation; his sleep, ordinarily as sound as a child’s, became broken and unrefreshing. Unless the disease were thrown off by regular exercise, Beddoes assured him, it would fasten upon him, and could not be overcome. Two years previously they had spent a summer at Burton, in Hampshire; why should they not go there again? In June, 1799, unaccompanied by his wife, whose health seemed also to be impaired, Southey went to seek a house. Two cottages, convertible into one, with a garden, a fish-pond, and a pigeon-house, promised a term of quiet andcomfort in “Southey Palace that is to be.” Possession was not to be had until Michaelmas, and part of the intervening time was very enjoyably spent in roaming among the vales and woods, the coombes and cliffs of Devon. It was in some measure a renewal of the open-air delight which had been his at the Arrabida and Cintra. “I have seen the Valley of Stones,” he writes: “Imagine a narrow vale between two ridges of hills somewhat steep; the southern hill turfed; the vale which runs from east to west covered with huge stones and fragments of stones among the fern that fills it; the northern ridge completely bare, excoriated of all turf and all soil, the very bones and skeleton of the earth; rock reclining upon rock, stone piled upon stone, a huge and terrific mass. A palace of the Preadamite kings, a city of the Anakim, must have appeared so shapeless and yet so like the ruins of what had been shaped, after the waters of the flood subsided. I ascended with some toil the highest point; two large stones inclining on each other formed a rude portal on the summit: here I sat down; a little level platform about two yards long lay before me, and then the eye fell immediately upon the sea, far, very far below. I never felt the sublimity of solitude before.”
But Southey could not rest. “I had rather leave off eating than poetizing,” he had said; and now the words seemed coming true, for he still poetized, and had almost ceased to eat. “Yesterday I finishedMadoc, thank God! and thoroughly to my own satisfaction; but I have resolved on one great, laborious, and radical alteration. It was my design to identify Madoc with Mango Capac, the legislator of Peru: in this I have totally failed; therefore Mango Capac is to be the hero of another poem.” There is something charming in the logic of Southey’s “therefore;”so excellent an epic hero must not go to waste; but when, on the following morning, he rose early, it was to put on paper the first hundred lines, not of Mango Capac, but of the Dom Daniel poem which we know asThalaba. AMohammed, to be written in hexameters, was also on the stocks; and Coleridge had promised the half of this. Southey, who remembered a certain quarto volume on Pantisocracy and other great unwritten works, including the last—a Life of Lessing, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge—knew the worth of his collaborateur’s promises. However, it matters little; “the only inconvenience that his dereliction can occasion will be that I shall write the poem in fragments, and have to seam them together at last.” “My Mohammed will be what I believe the Arabian was in the beginning of his career—sincere in enthusiasm; and it would puzzle a casuist to distinguish between the belief of inspiration and actual enthusiasm.” A short fragment of theMohammedwas actually written by Coleridge, and a short fragment by Southey, which, dating from 1799, have an interest in connexion with the history of the English hexameter. Last among these many projects, Southey has made up his mind to undertake one great historical work—the History of Portugal. This was no dream-project; Mango Capac never descended from his father the Sun to appear in Southey’s poem; Mohammed never emerged from the cavern where the spider had spread his net; but the work which was meant to rival Gibbon’s great history was in part achieved. It is a fact more pathetic than many others which make appeal for tears, that this most ambitious and most cherished design of Southey’s life, conceived at the age of twenty-six, and kept constantly in view through all his days of toil, was not yet half wrought out when, forty years later, the pen droppedfrom his hand, and the worn-out brain could think no more.
The deal shavings had hardly been cleared out of the twin cottages at Burton, when Southey was prostrated by a nervous fever; on recovering, he moved to Bristol, still weak, with strange pains about the heart, and sudden seizures of the head. An entire change of scene was obviously desirable. The sound of the brook that ran beside his uncle’s door at Cintra, the scent of the lemon-groves, the grandeur of the Arrabida, haunted his memory; there were books and manuscripts to be found in Portugal which were essential in the preparation of his great history of that country. Mr. Hill invited him; his good friend Elmsley, an old schoolfellow, offered him a hundred pounds. From every point of view it seemed right and prudent to go. Ailing and unsettled as he was, he yet found strength and time to put his hand to a good work before leaving Bristol. Chatterton always interested Southey deeply; they had this much at least in common, that both had often listened to the chimes of St. Mary Redcliffe, that both were lovers of antiquity, both were rich in store of verse, and lacked all other riches. Chatterton’s sister, Mrs. Newton, and her child were needy and neglected. It occurred to Southey and Cottle that an edition of her brother’s poems might be published for her benefit. Subscribers came in slowly, and the plan underwent some alterations; but in the end the charitable thought bore fruit, and the sister and niece of the great unhappy boy were lifted into security and comfort. To have done something to appease the moody and indignant spirit of a dead poet, was well; to have rescued from want a poor woman and her daughter, was perhaps even better.
Early in April, 1800, Southey was once more on his wayfrom Bristol, by Falmouth, to the Continent, accompanied by his wife, now about to be welcomed to Portugal by the fatherly uncle whose prudence she had once alarmed. The wind was adverse, and while the travellers were detained Southey strolled along the beach, caught soldier-crabs, and observed those sea-anemones which blossom anew in the verse of Thalaba. For reading on the voyage, he had brought Burns, Coleridge’s poems, the Lyrical Ballads, and a poem, with “miraculous beauties,” calledGebir, “written by God knows who.” But when the ship lost sight of England, Southey, with swimming head, had little spirit left for wrestling with the intractable thews of Landor’s early verse; he could just grunt out some crooked pun or quaint phrase in answer to inquiries as to how he did. Suddenly, on the fourth morning, came the announcement that a French cutter was bearing down upon them. Southey leaped to his feet, hurriedly removed his wife to a place of safety, and, musket in hand, took his post upon the quarter-deck. The smoke from the enemy’s matches could be seen. She was hailed, answered in broken English, and passed on. A moment more, and the suspense was over; she was English, manned from Guernsey. “You will easily imagine,” says Southey, “that my sensations at the ending of the business were very definable—one honest, simple joy that I was in a whole skin!” Two mornings more, and the sun rose behind the Berlings; the heights of Cintra became visible, and nearer, the silver dust of the breakers, with sea-gulls sporting over them; a pilot’s boat, with puffed and flapping sail, ran out; they passed thankfully our Lady of the Guide, and soon dropped anchor in the Tagus. An absence of four years had freshened every object to Southey’s sense of seeing, and now he had the joy of viewing all familiar things as strange through so dear a companion’s eyes.
Mr. Hill was presently on board with kindly greeting; he had hired a tiny house for them, perched well above the river, its little rooms cool with many doors and windows. Manuel the barber, brisk as Figaro, would be their factotum, and Mrs. Southey could also see a new maid—Maria Rosa. Maria by-and-by came to be looked at, in powder, straw-coloured gloves, fan, pink-ribands, muslin petticoat, green satin sleeves; she was “not one of the folk who sleep on straw mattresses;” withal she was young and clean. Mrs. Southey, who had liked little the prospect of being thrown abroad upon the world, was beginning to be reconciled to Portugal; roses and oranges and green peas in early May were pleasant things. Then the streets were an unending spectacle; now a negro going by with Christ in a glass case, to be kissed for a petty alms; now some picturesque, venerable beggar; now the little Emperor of the Holy Ghost, strutting it from Easter till Whitsuntide, a six-year-old mannikin with silk stockings, buckles, cocked hat, and sword, his gentlemen ushers attending, and his servants receiving donations on silver salvers. News of an assassination, from time to time, did not much disturb the tranquil tenor of ordinary life. There were old gardens to loiter in along vine-trellised walks, or in sunshine where the grey lizards glanced and gleamed. And eastward from the city were lovely by-lanes amid blossoming olive-trees or market-gardens, veined by tiny aqueducts and musical with the creak of water-wheels, which told of cool refreshment. There was also the vast public aqueduct to visit; Edith Southey, holding her husband’s hand, looked down, hardly discovering the diminished figures below of women washing in the brook of Alcantara. If the sultry noon in Lisbon was hard to endure, evening made amends; then strong sea-winds swept the narrowest alley, and rolled theircurrent down every avenue. And later, it was pure content to look down upon the moonlighted river, with Almada stretching its black isthmus into the waters that shone like midnight snow.
Before moving to Cintra, they wished to witness the procession of the Body of God—Southey likes the English words as exposing “the naked nonsense of the blasphemy”—those of St. Anthony, and the Heart of Jesus, and the first bull-fight. Everything had grown into one insufferable glare; the very dust was bleached; the light was like the quivering of a furnace fire. Every man and beast was asleep; the stone-cutter slept with his head upon the stone; the dog slept under the very cart-wheels; the bells alone slept not, nor ceased from their importunate clamour. At length—it was near mid-June—a marvellous cleaning of streets took place, the houses were hung with crimson damask, soldiers came and lined the ways, windows and balconies filled with impatient watchers—not a jewel in Lisbon but was on show. With blare of music the procession began; first, the banners of the city and its trades, the clumsy bearers crab-sidling along; an armed champion carrying a flag; wooden St. George held painfully on horseback; led horses, their saddles covered with rich escutcheons; all the brotherhoods, an immense train of men in red or grey cloaks; the knights of the orders superbly dressed; the whole patriarchal church in glorious robes; and then, amid a shower of rose-leaves fluttering from the windows, the Pix, and after the Pix, the Prince. On a broiling Sunday, the amusement being cool and devout, was celebrated the bull-feast. The first wound sickened Edith; Southey himself, not without an effort, looked on and saw “the death-sweat darkening the dun hide”—a circumstance borne in mind for hisThalaba. “I am notquite sure,” he writes, “that my curiosity in once going was perfectly justifiable, but the pain inflicted by the sight was expiation enough.”
After this it was high time to take refuge from the sun among the lemon-groves at Cintra. Here, if ever in his life, Southey for a brief season believed that the grasshopper is wiser than the ant; a true Portuguese indolence overpowered him. “I have spent my mornings half naked in a wet room dozing upon the bed, my right hand not daring to touch my left.” Such glorious indolence could only be a brief possession with Southey. More often he would wander by the streams to those spots where purple crocuses carpeted the ground, and there rest and read. Sometimes seated sideways on one of the sure-footedburros, with a boy to beat and guide the brute, he would jog lazily on, while Edith, now skilled in “ass-womanship,” would jog along on a brother donkey. Once and again a fog—not unwelcome—came rolling in from the ocean, one huge mass of mist, marching through the valley like a victorious army, approaching, blotting the brightness, but leaving all dank and fresh. And always the evenings were delightful, when fireflies sparkled under the trees, or in July and August, as their light went out, when the grillo began his song. “I eat oranges, figs, and delicious pears—drink Colares wine, a sort of half-way excellence between port and claret—read all I can lay my hands on—dream of poem after poem, and play after play—take a siesta of two hours, and am as happy as if life were but one everlasting today, and that tomorrow was not to be provided for.”
But Southey’s second visit to Portugal was, on the whole, no season of repose. A week in the southern climate seemed to have restored him to health, and he assailedfolio after folio in his uncle’s library, rising each morning at five, “to lay in bricks for the great Pyramid of my history.” The chronicles, the laws, the poetry of Portugal, were among these bricks. Nor did he slacken in his ardour as a writer of verse. Six books ofThalabawere in his trunk in manuscript when he sailed from Falmouth; the remaining six were of a southern birth. “I am busy,” he says, “in correctingThalabafor the press.... It is a good job done, and so I have thought of another, and another, and another.” As withJoan of Arc, so with this maturer poem the correction was a rehandling which doubled the writer’s work. To draw the pen across six hundred lines did not cost him a pang. At length the manuscript was despatched to his friend Rickman, with instructions to make as good a bargain as he could for the first thousand copies. ByJoanand the miscellaneousPoemsof 1797, Southey had gained not far from a hundred and fifty pounds; he might fairly expect a hundred guineas forThalaba. It would buy the furniture of his long-expected house. But he was concerned about the prospects of Harry, his younger brother; and now William Taylor wrote that some provincial surgeon of eminence would board and instruct the lad during four or five years for precisely a hundred guineas. “A hundred guineas!” Southey exclaims; “well, but, thank God, there isThalabaready, for which I ask this sum.” “Thalabafinished, all my poetry,” he writes, “instead of being wasted in rivulets and ditches, shall flow into the great Madoc Mississippi river.” One epic poem, however, he finds too little to content him; alreadyThe Curse of Kehamais 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 asThalaba; and a nearer one of aPersian story, of which I see the germ of vitality. I take the system of the Zendavesta for my mythology, and introduce the powers of darkness persecuting a Persian, one of the hundred and fifty sons of the great king; an Athenian captive is a prominent character, and the whole warfare of the evil power ends in exalting a Persian prince into a citizen of Athens.” From which catastrophe we may infer that Southey had still something republican about his heart.
Before quitting Portugal, the Southeys, with their friend Waterhouse and a party of ladies, travelled northwards, encountering very gallantly the trials of the way; Mafra, its convent and library, had been already visited by Southey. “Do you love reading?” asked the friar who accompanied them, overhearing some remark about the books. “Yes.” “And I,” said the honest Franciscan, “love eating and drinking.” At Coimbra—that central point from which radiates the history and literature of Portugal—Southey would have agreed feelingly with the good brother of the Mafra convent; he had looked forward to precious moments of emotion in that venerable city; but air and exercise had given him a cruel appetite; if truth must be told, the ducks of the monastic poultry-yard were more to him than the precious finger of St. Anthony. “Ididlong,” he confesses, “to buy, beg, or steal a dinner.” The dinner must somehow have been secured before he could approach in a worthy spirit that most affecting monument at Coimbra—the Fountain of Tears. “It is the spot where Inez de Castro was accustomed to meet her husband Pedro, and weep for him in his absence. Certainly her dwelling-house was in the adjoining garden; and from there she was dragged, to be murdered at the feet of the king, her father-in-law.... I, who have longplanned a tragedy upon the subject, stood upon my own scene.” While Southey and his companions gazed at the fountains and their shadowing cedar-trees, the gownsmen gathered round; the visitors were travel-stained and bronzed by the sun; perhaps the witty youths cheered for the lady with the squaw tint; whatever offence may have been given, the ladies’ protectors found them “impudent blackguards,” and with difficulty suppressed pugilistic risings.
After an excursion southwards to Algarve, Southey made ready for his return to England (1801). His wife desired it, and he had attained the main objects of his sojourn abroad. His health had never been more perfect; he had read widely; he had gathered large material for his History; he knew where to put his hand on this or that which might prove needful, whenever he should return to complete his work among the libraries of Portugal. On arriving at Bristol, a letter from Coleridge met him. It was dated from Greta Hall, Keswick; and after reminding Southey that Bristol had recently lost the miraculous young man, Davy, and adding that he, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had experiences, sufferings, hopes, projects to impart, which would beguile much time, “were you on a desert island and I yourFriday,” it went on to present the attractions of Keswick, and in particular of Greta Hall, in a way which could not be resisted. Taking all in all—the beauty of the prospect, the roominess of the house, the lowness of the rent, the unparalleled merits of the landlord, the neighbourhood of noble libraries—it united advantages not to be found together elsewhere. “In short”—the appeal wound up—“for situation and convenience—and when I mention the name of Wordsworth, for society of men of intellect—I know no placein which you and Edith would find yourselves so well suited.”
Meanwhile Drummond, an M.P. and a translator of Persius, who was going as ambassador, first to Palermo and then to Constantinople, was on the look-out for a secretary. The post would be obtained for Southey by his friend Wynn, if possible; this might lead to a consulship; why not to the consulship at Lisbon, with 1000l.a year? Such possibilities, however, could not prevent him from speedily visiting Coleridge and Keswick. “Time and absence make strange work with our affections,” so writes Southey; “but mine are ever returning to rest upon you. I have other and dear friends, but none with whom the whole of my being is intimate.... Oh! I have yet such dreams. Is it quite clear that you and I were not meant for some better star, and dropped by mistake into this world of pounds, shillings, and pence?” So for the first time Southey set foot in Keswick, and looked upon the lake and the hills which were to become a portion of his being, and which have taken him so closely, so tenderly, to themselves. His first feeling was one not precisely of disappointment, but certainly of remoteness from this northern landscape; he had not yet come out from the glow and the nobleabandonof the South. “These lakes,” he says, “are like rivers; but oh for the Mondego and the Tagus! And these mountains, beautifully indeed are they shaped and grouped; but oh for the grand Monchique! and for Cintra, my paradise!”
Time alone was needed to calm and temper his sense of seeing; for when, leaving Mrs. Southey with her sister and Coleridge, he visited his friend Wynn at Llangedwin, and breathed the mountain air of his own Prince Madoc, all the loveliness of Welsh streams and rivers sank into hissoul. “The Dee is broad and shallow, and its dark waters shiver into white and silver and hues of amber brown. No mud upon the shore—no bushes—no marsh plants—anywhere a child might stand dry-footed and dip his hand into the water.” And again a contrasted picture: “The mountain-side was stony, and a few trees grew among its stones; the other side was more wooded, and had grass on the top, and a huge waterfall thundered into the bottom, and thundered down the bottom. When it had nearly passed these rocky straits, it met another stream. The width of water then became considerable, and twice it formed a large black pool, to the eye absolutely stagnant, the froth of the waters that entered there sleeping upon the surface; it had the deadness of enchantment; yet was not the pool wider than the river above it and below it, where it foamed over and fell.” Such free delight as Southey had among the hills of Wales came quickly to an end. A letter was received offering him the position of private secretary to Mr. Corry, Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland, with a salary of four hundred pounds a year. Rickman was in Dublin, and this was Rickman’s doing. Southey, as he was in prudence bound to do, accepted the appointment, hastened back to Keswick, bade farewell for a little while to his wife, and started for Dublin in no cheerful frame of mind.
At a later time, Southey possessed Irish friends whom he honoured and loved; he has written wise and humane words about the Irish people. But all through his career Ireland was to Southey somewhat too much that ideal country—of late to be found only in the region of humorous-pathetic melodrama—in which the business of life is carried on mainly by the agency of bulls and blunder-busses; and it required a distinct effort on his part to conceivethe average Teague or Patrick otherwise than as a potato-devouring troglodyte, on occasions grotesquely amiable, but more often with the rage of Popery working in his misproportioned features. Those hours during which Southey waited for the packet were among the heaviest of his existence. After weary tackings in a baffling wind, the ship was caught into a gale, and was whirled away, fifteen miles north of Dublin, to the fishing-town of Balbriggan. Then, a drive across desolate country, which would have depressed the spirits had it not been enlivened by the airs and humours of little Dr. Solomon, the unique, the omniscient, the garrulous, next after Bonaparte the most illustrious of mortals, inventor of the Cordial Balm of Gilead, and possessor of a hundred puncheons of rum. When the new private secretary arrived, the chancellor was absent; the secretary, therefore, set to work on rebuilding a portion of hisMadoc. Presently Mr. Corry appeared, and there was a bow and a shake of hands; then he hurried away to London, to be followed by Southey, who, going round by Keswick, was there joined by his wife. From London Southey writes to Rickman, “The chancellor and the scribe go on in the same way. The scribe hath made out a catalogue of all books published since the commencement of ’97 upon finance and scarcity; he hath also copied a paper written by J.R. [John Rickman] containing some Irish alderman’s hints about oak-bark; and nothing more hath the scribe done in his vocation. Duly he calls at the chancellor’s door; sometimes he is admitted to immediate audience; sometimes kicketh his heels in the antechamber; ... sometimes a gracious message emancipates him for the day. Secrecy hath been enjoined him as to these State proceedings. On three subjects he is directed to read andresearch—corn-laws, finance, tythes, according to their written order.” The independent journals meanwhile had compared Corry and Southey, the two State conspirators, to Empson and Dudley; and delicately expressed a hope that the poet would make no falsenumbersin his new work.
Southey, who had already worn an ass’s head in one of Gillray’s caricatures, was not afflicted by the newspaper sarcasm; but the vacuity of such a life was intolerable; and when it was proposed that he should become tutor to Corry’s son, he brought his mind finally to the point of resigning “a foolish office and a good salary.” His notions of competence were moderate; the vagabondage between the Irish and English headquarters entailed by his office was irksome. His books were accumulating, and there was ample work to be done among them if he had but a quiet library of his own. Then, too, there was another good reason for resigning. A new future was opening for Southey. Early in the year (1802) his mother died. She had come to London to be with her son; there she had been stricken with mortal illness; true to her happy, self-forgetful instincts, she remained calm, uncomplaining, considerate for others. “Go down, my dear; I shall sleep presently,” she had said, knowing that death was at hand. With his mother, the last friend of Southey’s infancy and childhood was gone. “I calmed and curbed myself,” he writes, “and forced myself to employment; but at night there was no sound of feet in her bedroom, to which I had been used to listen, and in the morning it was not my first business to see her.” The past was past indeed. But as the year opened, it brought a happy promise; before summer would end, a child might be in his arms. Here were sufficient reasons for his resignation; a library and a nursery ought, he says, to be stationary.
To Bristol husband and wife came, and there found a small furnished house. After the roar of Fleet Street, and the gathering of distinguished men—Fuseli, Flaxman, Barry, Lamb, Campbell, Bowles—there was a strangeness in the great quiet of the place. But in that quiet Southey could observe each day the growth of the pile of manuscript containing his version ofAmadis of Gaul, for which Longman and Rees promised him a munificent sixty pounds. He toiled at hisHistory of Portugal, finding matter of special interest in that part which was concerned with the religious orders. He received from his Lisbon collection precious boxes folio-crammed. “My dear and noble books! Such folios of saints! dull books enough for my patience to diet upon, till all my flock be gathered together into one fold.” Sixteen volumes of Spanish poetry are lying uncut in the next room; a folio yet untasted jogs his elbow; two of the best and rarest chronicles coyly invite him. He had books enough in England to employ three years of active industry. And underlying all thoughts of the great Constable Nuño Alvares Pereyra, of the King D. Joaõ I., and of the Cid, deeper than the sportsman pleasure of hunting from their lair strange facts about the orders Cistercian, Franciscan, Dominican, Jesuit, there was a thought of that new-comer whom, says Southey, “I already feel disposed to call whelp and dog, and all those vocables of vituperation by which a man loves to call those he loves best.”
In September, 1802, was born Southey’s first child, named Margaret Edith, after her mother and her dead grandmother; a flat-nosed, round-foreheaded, grey-eyed, good-humoured girl. “I call Margaret,” he says, in a sober mood of fatherly happiness, “by way of avoiding all commonplace phraseology of endearment, a worthy child anda most excellent character. She loves me better than any one except her mother; her eyes are as quick as thought; she is all life and spirit, and as happy as the day is long; but that little brain of hers is never at rest, and it is painful to see how dreams disturb her.” For Margery and her mother and the folios a habitation must be found. Southey inclined now towards settling in the neighbourhood of London—now towards Norwich, where Dr. Sayers and William Taylor would welcome him—now towards Keswick; but its horrid latitude, its incessant rains! On the whole, his heart turned most fondly to Wales; and there, in one of the loveliest spots of Great Britain, in the Vale of Neath, was a house to let, by name Maes Gwyn. Southey gave his fancy the rein, and pictured himself “housed and homed” in Maes Gwyn, working steadily at theHistory of Portugal, and now and again glancing away from his work to have a look at Margery seated in her little great chair. But it was never to be; a difference with the landlord brought to an end his treaty for the house, and in August the child lay dying. It was bitter to part with what had been so long desired—during seven childless years—and what had grown so dear. But Southey’s heart was strong; he drew himself together, returned to his toil, now less joyous than before, and set himself to strengthen and console his wife.
Bristol was henceforth a place of mournful memories. “Edith,” writes Southey, “will be nowhere so well as with her sister Coleridge. She has a little girl some six months old, and I shall try and graft her into the wound while it is yet fresh.” Thus Greta Hall received its guests (September, 1803). At first the sight of little Sara Coleridge and her baby cooings caused shootings of pain on which Southey had not counted. Was the experiment ofthis 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.
The best of life with Southey was yet to come; but in what remains there are few outstanding events to chronicle; there is nowhere any splendour of circumstance. Of some lives the virtue is distilled, as it were, into a few exquisite moments—moments of rapture, of vision, of sudden and shining achievement; all the days and years seem to exist only for the sake of such faultless moments, and it matters little whether such a life, of whose very essence it is to break the bounds of time and space, be long or short as measured by the falling of sandgrains or the creeping of a shadow. Southey’s life was not one of these; its excellence was constant, uniform, perhaps somewhat too evenly distributed. He wrought in his place day after day, season after season. He submitted to the good laws of use and wont. He grew stronger, calmer, more full-fraught with stores of knowledge, richer in treasure of the heart. Time laid its hand upon him gently and unfalteringly: the bounding step became less light and swift; the ringing voice lapsed into sadder fits of silence; the raven hair changed to a snowy white; only still the indefatigable eye ran down the long folio columns, and the indefatigable hand still held the pen—until all true life had ceased. When it has been said that Southey was appointedPye’s successor in the laureateship, that he received an honorary degree from his university, that now and again he visited the Continent, that children were born to him from among whom death made choice of the dearest; and then we add that he wrote and published books, the leading facts of Southey’s life have been told. Had he been worse or a weaker man, we might look to find mysteries, picturesque vices, or engaging follies; as it is, everything is plain, straightforward, substantial. What makes the life of Southey eminent and singular is its unity of purpose, its persistent devotion to a chosen object, its simplicity, purity, loyalty, fortitude, kindliness, truth.
The river Greta, before passing under the bridge at the end of Main Street, Keswick, winds about the little hill on which stands Greta Hall; its murmur may be heard when all is still beyond the garden and orchard; to the west it catches the evening light. “In front,” Coleridge wrote when first inviting his friend to settle with him, “we have a giants’ camp—an encamped army of tent-like mountains, which by an inverted arch gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely vale and the wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left Derwentwater and Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of Borrowdale. Behind us the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two chasms and a tent-like ridge in the larger.” Southey’s house belongs in a peculiar degree to his life: in it were stored the treasures upon which his intellect drew for sustenance; in it his affections found their earthly abiding-place; all the most mirthful, all the most mournful, recollections of Southey hang about it; to it in every little wandering his heart reverted like an exile’s; it was at once his workshop and his playground; and for a time, while he endured a living death, it became his antechamberto the tomb. The rambling tenement consisted of two houses under one roof, the larger part being occupied by the Coleridges and Southeys, the smaller for a time by Mr. Jackson, their landlord. On the ground-floor was the parlour which served as dining-room and general sitting-room, a pleasant chamber looking upon the green in front; here also were Aunt Lovell’s sitting-room, and the mangling-room, in which stood ranged in a row the long array of clogs, from the greatest even unto the least, figuring in a symbol the various stages of human life. The stairs to the right of the kitchen led to a landing-place filled with bookcases; a few steps more led to the little bedroom occupied by Mrs. Coleridge and her daughter. “A few steps farther,” writes Sara Coleridge, whose description is here given in abridgment, “was a little wing bedroom—then the study, where my uncle sat all day occupied with literary labours and researches, but which was used as a drawing-room for company. Here all the tea-visiting guests were received. The room had three windows, a large one looking down upon the green with the wide flower-border, and over to Keswick Lake and mountains beyond. There were two smaller windows looking towards the lower part of the town seen beyond the nursery-garden. The room was lined with books in fine bindings; there were books also in brackets, elegantly lettered vellum-covered volumes lying on their sides in a heap. The walls were hung with pictures, mostly portraits.... At the back of the room was a comfortable sofa, and there were sundry tables, beside my uncle’s library table, his screen, desk, etc. Altogether, with its internal fittings up, its noble outlook, and something pleasing in its proportions, this was a charming room.” Hard by the study was Southey’s bedroom. We need not ramble fartherthrough passages lined with books, and up and down flights of stairs to Mr. Jackson’s organ-room, and Mrs. Lovell’s room, and Hartley’s parlour, and the nurseries, and one dark apple-room supposed to be the abode of a bogle. Without, greensward, flowers, shrubs, strawberry-beds, fruit-trees, encircled the house; to the back, beyond the orchard, a little wood stretched down to the river-side. A rough path ran along the bottom of the wood; here, on a covered seat, Southey often read or planned future work, and here his little niece loved to play in sight of the dimpling water. “Dear Greta Hall!” she exclaims; “and oh, that rough path beside the Greta! How much of my childhood, of my girlhood, of my youth, were spent there!”
Southey’s attachment to his mountain town and its lakes was of no sudden growth. He came to them as one not born under their influence; that power of hills to which Wordsworth owed fealty, had not brooded upon Southey during boyhood; the rich southern meadows, the wooded cliffs of Avon, the breezy downs, had nurtured his imagination, and to these he was still bound by pieties of the heart. In the churchyard at Ashton, where lay his father and his kinsfolk, the beneficent cloud of mingled love and sorrow most overshadowed his spirit. His imagination did not soar, as did Wordsworth’s, in naked solitudes; he did not commune with a Presence immanent in external nature: the world, as he viewed it, was an admirable habitation for mankind—a habitation with a history. Even after he had grown a mountaineer, he loved a humanized landscape, one in which the gains of man’s courage, toil, and endurance are apparent. Flanders, where the spade has wrought its miracles of diligence, where the slow canal-boat glides, where thecarillonsripple from old spires, where sturdy burghers fought for freedom, and where vellum-boundquartos might be sought and found, Flanders, on the whole gave Southey deeper and stronger feelings than did Switzerland. The ideal land of his dreams was always Spain: the earthly paradise for him was Cintra, with its glory of sun, and a glow even in its depths of shadow. But as the years went by, Spain became more and more a memory, less and less a hope; and the realities of life in his home were of more worth every day. When, in 1807, it grew clear that Greta Hall was to be his life-long place of abode, Southey’s heart closed upon it with a tenacious grasp. He set the plasterer and carpenter to work; he planted shrubs; he enclosed the garden; he gathered his books about him, and thought that here were materials for the industry of many years; he held in his arms children who were born in this new home; and he looked to Crosthwaite Churchyard, expecting, with quiet satisfaction, that when toil was ended he should there take his rest.
“I don’t talk much about these things,” Southey writes; “but these lakes and mountains give me a deep joy for which I suspect nothing elsewhere can compensate, and this is a feeling which time strengthens instead of weakening.” Some of the delights of southern counties he missed; his earliest and deepest recollections were connected with flowers; both flowers and fruits were now too few; there was not a cowslip to be found near Keswick. “Here in Cumberland I miss the nightingale and the violet—the most delightful bird and the sweetest flower.” But for such losses there were compensations. A pastoral land will give amiable pledges for the seasons and the months, and will perform its engagements with a punctual observance; to this the mountains hardly condescend, but they shower at their will a sudden largess of unimagined beauty. Southey would sally out for a constitutional at histhree-mile pace, the peaked cap slightly shadowing his eyes, which were coursing over the pages of a book held open as he walked; he had left his study to obtain exercise, and so to preserve health; he was not a laker engaged in view-hunting; he did not affect the contemplative mood which at the time was not and could not be his. But when he raised his eyes, or when, quickening his three-mile to a four-mile pace, he closed the book, the beauty which lay around him liberated and soothed his spirit. This it did unfailingly; and it might do more, for incalculable splendours, visionary glories, exaltations, terrors, are momentarily possible where mountain, and cloud, and wind, and sunshine meet. Southey, as he says, did not talk much of these things, but they made life for him immeasurably better than it would have been in city confinement; there were spaces, vistas, an atmosphere around his sphere of work, which lightened and relieved it. The engagements in his study were always so numerous and so full of interest that it needed an effort to leave the table piled with books and papers. But a May morning would draw him forth into the sun in spite of himself. Once abroad, Southey had a vigorous joy in the quickened blood, and the muscles impatient with energy long pent up. The streams were his especial delight; he never tired of their deep retirement, their shy loveliness, and their melody; they could often beguile him into an hour of idle meditation; their beauty has in an especial degree passed into his verse. When his sailor brother Thomas came and settled in the Vale of Newlands, Southey would quickly cover the ground from Keswick at his four-mile pace, and in the beck at the bottom of Tom’s fields, on summer days, he would plunge and re-plunge and act the river-god in the natural seats of mossy stone. Or he would be overpoweredsome autumn morning by the clamour of childish voices voting a holiday by acclamation. Their father must accompany them; it would do him good, they knew it would; they knew he did not take sufficient exercise, for they had heard him say so. Where should the scramble be? To Skiddaw Dod, or Causey Pike, or Watenlath, or, as a compromise between their exuberant activity and his inclination for the chair and the fireside, to Walla Crag? And there, while his young companions opened their baskets and took their noonday meal, Southey would seat himself—as Westall has drawn him—upon the bough of an ash-tree, the water flowing smooth and green at his feet, but a little higher up broken, flashing, and whitening in its fall; and there in the still autumn noon he would muse happily, placidly, not now remembering with overkeen desire the gurgling tanks and fountains of Cintra, his Paradise of early manhood.[7]
On summer days, when the visits of friends, or strangers bearing letters of introduction, compelled him to idleness, Southey’s more ambitious excursions were taken. But he was well aware that those who form acquaintance with a mountain region during a summer all blue and gold, know little of its finer power. It is October that brings most often those days faultless, pearl-pure, of affecting influence,