The texture of Southey’s life was so uniform, the round from morning till night repeated itself with so much regularity, that one day may stand as representative of a thousand. We possess his record of how the waking hours went by when he was about thirty years old, and a similar record written when he was twice that age. His surroundings had changed in the mean time, and he himself had changed; the great bare room which he used from the first as a study, fresh plastered in 1804, with the trowel-lines on the ceiling pierced by the flaws of winter, containing two chairs and a little table—“God help me!” he exclaims, “I look in it like a cock-robin in a church”—this room had received, long before 1834, its lining of comely books, its white and gold pyramids, its brackets, its cherished portraits. The occupant of the study had the same spare frame, the same aspect of lightness and of strength, the same full eyebrows shadowing the dark-brown eyes, the same variously expressive muscular mouth; the youthful wildness in his countenance had given place to a thoughtful expression, and the abundant hair still clustering over his great brow was snowy white. Whatever had changed, his habits—though never his tyrants—remained, with some variations in detail, the same. “My actions,” he writes to a friend not very long after his arrival in Keswick, “are as regular as those of St. Dunstan’s quarter-boys. Three pages of history after breakfast (equivalent to five in small quarto printing); then to transcribe and copy for the press, or to make my selections and biographies, or what else suits my humour till dinner-time; from dinner to tea I read, write letters, see the newspaper, and very often indulge in a siesta—for sleep agrees with me.... After tea I go to poetry, and correct, and rewrite, and copy till I am tired, and then turn to anything else till supper; and this is my life—which, if it be not a very merry one, is yet as happy as heart could wish.” “See how the day is disposed of!” begins the later record; “I get out of bed as the clock strikes six, and shut the house-door after me as it strikes seven.[8] After two hours with Davies, home to breakfast, after which Cuthbert engages me till about half-past ten, and when the post brings no letters that either interest or trouble me (for of the latter I have many), by eleven I have done with the newspaper, and can then set about what is properly the business of the day. But letters are often to be written, and I am liable to frequent interruptions; so that there are not many mornings in which I can command from two to three unbroken hours at the desk. At two I take my daily walk, be the weather what it may, and when the weather permits, with a book in my hand; dinner at four, read about half an hour; then take to the sofa with a different book, and after a few pages get my soundest sleep, till summoned to tea at six. My best time during the winter is by candle-light; twilight interferes with it a little; and in the season of company I can never count upon an evening’s work. Supper at half-past nine, after which I read an hour, and then to bed. The greatest part of my miscellaneous work is done in the odds and ends of time.”

It was part of Southey’s regimen to carry on several works at once; this he found to be economy of time, and he believed it necessary for the preservation of his health. Whenever one object entirely occupied his attention, it haunted him, oppressed him, troubled his dreams. The remedy was simple—to do one thing in the morning, another in the evening. To lay down poetry and presently to attack history seems feasible, and no ill policy for one who is forced to take all he can out of himself; but Southey would turn from one poetical theme to another, and could day by day advance with a pair of epics. This was a source of unfailing wonder to Landor. “When I write a poem,” he says, “my heart and all my feelings are upon it.... High poems will not admit flirtation.” Little by little was Southey’s way, and so he got on with many things. “Last night,” he writes to Bedford, “I began the Preface [to Specimens of English Poets]—huzza! And now, Grosvenor, let me tell you what I have to do. I am writing—1. The History of Portugal; 2. The Chronicle of the Cid; 3. The Curse of Kehama; 4. Espriella’s Letters. Look you, all these I am writing.... By way of interlude comes in this preface. Don’t swear, and bid me do one thing at a time. I tell you I can’t afford to do one thing at a time—no, nor two neither; and it is only by doing many things that I contrive to do so much: for I cannot work long together at anything without hurting myself, and so I do everything by heats; then, by the time I am tired of one, my inclination for another is come round.” A strong, deliberate energy, accordingly, is at the back of all Southey’s work; but not that blind creative rapture which will have its own way, and leaves its subject weak but appeased. “In the day-time I laboured,” says Landor, “and at night unburdened my soul, shedding many tears. My Tiberius has so shaken me at last that the least thing affects me violently.” Southey shrank back from such agitations. A great Elizabethan poet is described by one of his contemporaries as one standing

Southey did not wade so far; he stepped down calmly until the smooth waters touched his waist; dipped seven times, and returned to the bank. It was a beautiful and an elevating rite; but the waves sing with lyric lips only in the midmost stream; and he who sings with them, and is swift as they, need not wonder if he sink after a time, faint, breathless, delighted.

Authorship, it must be remembered, was Southey’s trade, the business of his life, and this, at least, he knew how to conduct well. To be a prophet and call down flame from heaven, and disappear in a whirlwind and a chariot of fire, is sublime; but prophets can go in the strength of a single meal for more days and nights than one would choose to name in this incredulous age, and, if they eat, there are ravens to bring them food. No ravens brought loaves to Greta Hall; and Southey had an unprophet-like craving for the creature comforts of beef and bread, for wine if it might be had, and at supper for one meditative tumbler of punch or black-currant rum. Besides, what ravens were ever pledged to feed a prophet’s sisters-in-law, or his nephews and nieces? Let it be praise enough for much of Southey’s performance that he did good work in workmanlike fashion. To shift knowledge into more convenient positions is to render no unimportant service to mankind. In the gathering of facts, Southey was both swift and patient in an extraordinary degree; he went often alone, and he went far; in the art of exposition he was unsurpassed; and his fine moral feeling and profound sympathy with elementary justice created, as De Quincey has observed, a soul under what else might well be denominated, Miltonically, “the ribs of death.” From the mending of his pens to the second reading aloud of his proof-sheets, attending as he read to the fall of each word upon the ear, Southey had a diligent care for everything that served to make his work right. He wrote at a moderate pace; re-wrote; wrote a third time if it seemed desirable; corrected with minute supervision. He accomplished so much, not because he produced with unexampled rapidity, but because he worked regularly, and never fell into a mood of apathy or ennui. No periods of tempestuous vacancy lay between his periods of patient labour. One work always overlapped another—thus, that first idle day, the begetter of so many idle descendants, never came. But let us hear the craftsman giving a lesson in the knack of authorship to his brother, Dr. Henry Southey, who has a notion of writing something on the Crusades:

Winter was Southey’s harvest season. Then for weeks no visitor knocked at Greta Hall, except perhaps Mr. Wordsworth, who had plodded all the way from Rydal on his indefatigable legs. But in summer interruptions were frequent, and Southey, who had time for everything, had time to spare not only for friends but for strangers. The swarm of lakers was, indeed, not what it is now-a-days, but to a studious man it was, perhaps, not less formidable. By Gray’s time the secret of the lakes had been found out; and if the visitors were fewer, they were less swift upon the wing, and their rank or fame often entitled them to particular attention. Coroneted coaches rolled into Keswick, luggage-laden; the American arrived sometimes to make sure that Derwentwater would not be missed out of Lake Michigan, sometimes to see King George’s laureate; and cultured Americans were particularly welcome to Southey. Long-vacation reading-parties from Oxford and Cambridge—known among the good Cumberland folk as the “cathedrals”—made Keswick a resort. Well for them if, provided with an introduction, they were invited to dine at Greta Hall, were permitted to gaze on the choice old Spaniards, and to converse with the laureate’s stately Edith and her learned cousin. Woe to them if, after the entanglements of a Greek chorus or descriptions of the temperate man and the magnanimous man, they sought to restore their tone by a cat-worrying expedition among the cottages of Keswick. Southey’s cheek glowed, his eye darkened and flashed, if he chanced to witness cruelty; some of the Cambridge “cathedrals” who received a letter concerning cats in July, 1834, may still bear the mark of its leaded thong in their moral fibre, and be the better for possessing Southey’s sign-manual.

A young step-child of Oxford visited Keswick in the winter of 1811-12, and sought the acquaintance of the author of Thalaba. Had Southey been as intolerant or as unsympathetic as some have represented him, he could not have endured the society of one so alien in opinion and so outspoken as Shelley. But courtesy, if it were nothing more, was at least part of Southey’s self-respect; his intolerance towards persons was, in truth, towards a certain ideal, a certain group of opinions; when hand touched hand and eye met eye, all intolerance vanished, and he was open to every gracious attraction of character and manner. There was much in Shelley that could not fail to interest Southey; both loved poetry, and both felt the proud, secluded grandeur of Landor’s verse; both loved men, and thought the world wants mending, though their plans of reform might differ. That Shelley was a rebel expelled from Oxford did not shock Southey, who himself had been expelled from Westminster and rejected at Christ Church. Shelley’s opinions were crude and violent, but their spirit was generous, and such opinions held by a youth in his teens generally mean no more than that his brain is working and his heart ardent. Shelley’s rash marriage reminded Southey of another marriage, celebrated at Bristol some fifteen years ago, which proved that rashness is not always folly. The young man’s admiration of Thalaba spoke well for him; and certainly during the earlier weeks of their intercourse there was on Shelley’s part a becoming deference to one so much his superior in years and in learning, deference to one who had achieved much while Shelley still only dreamed of achievement. Southey thought he saw in the revolutionary enthusiast an image of his former self. “Here,” he says, “is a man at Keswick who acts upon me as my own ghost would do. He is just what I was in 1794. His name is Shelley, son to the member for Shoreham.... At present he has got to the Pantheistic stage of philosophy, and in the course of a week I expect he will be a Berkeleyan, for I have put him upon a course of Berkeley. It has surprised him a good deal to meet, for the first time in his life, with a man who perfectly understands him and does him full justice. I tell him that all the difference between us is that he is nineteen and I am thirty-seven; and I daresay it will not be very long before I shall succeed in convincing him that he may be a true philosopher and do a great deal of good with 6000l. a year; the thought of which troubles him a great deal more at present than ever the want of sixpence (for I have known such a want) did me.” There were other differences between Robert Southey and the inconstant star that passed by Greta Hall than that of years. Southey had quickly learned to put a bound to his desires, and within that bound to work out for himself a possession of measureless worth. It seemed to him part of a man’s virtue to adhere loyally to the bond signed for each of us when we enter life. Is our knowledge limited—then let us strive within those limits. Can we never lay hands on the absolute good—then let us cherish the good things that are ours. Do we hold our dearest possessions on a limited tenure—that is hard, but is it not in the bond? How faint a loyalty is his who merely yields obedience perforce! let us rather cast in our will, unadulterated and whole, with that of our divine Leader; sursum corda—there is a heaven above. But Shelley—the nympholept of some radiant ante-natal sphere—fled through his brief years ever in pursuit of his lost lady of light; and for him loyalty to the bond of life seemed to mean a readiness to forget all things, however cherished, so soon as they had fulfilled their service of speeding him on towards the unattainable. It could not but be that men living under rules so diverse should before long find themselves far asunder. But they parted in 1812 in no spirit of ill-will. Southey was already a state-pensioner and a champion of the party of order in the Quarterly Review; this did not prevent the young apostle of liberty and fraternity from entering his doors, and enjoying Mrs. Southey’s tea-cakes. Irish affairs were earnestly discussed; but Southey, who had written generously of Emmett both in his verse and in the Quarterly, could not be hostile to one whose illusions were only over-sanguine; and while the veritable Southey was before Shelley’s eyes, he could not discern the dull hireling, the venomous apostate, the cold-blooded assassin, of freedom conjured up by Byron and others to bear Southey’s name.

Three years later Shelley presented his Alastor to the laureate, and Southey duly acknowledged the gift. The elder poet was never slow to recognize genius in young men, but conduct was to him of higher importance than genius; he deplored some acts in Shelley’s life which seemed to result directly from opinions professed at Keswick in 1811—opinions then interpreted as no more than the disdain of checks felt by every spirited boy. Southey heard no more from him until a letter came from Pisa inquiring whether Shelley’s former entertainer at Keswick were his recent critic of the Quarterly Review, with added comments, courteous but severe, on Southey’s opinions. The reply was that Southey had not written the paper, and had never in any of his writings alluded to Shelley in any way. A second letter followed on each side, the elder man pleading, exhorting, warning; the younger justifying himself, and returning to the attack. “There the correspondence ended. On Shelley’s part it was conducted with the courtesy which was natural to him; on mine, in the spirit of one who was earnestly admonishing a fellow-creature.”

Much of Southey’s time—his most valued possession—was given to his correspondents. Napoleon’s plan of answering letters, according to Bourrienne, was to let them lie unopened for six weeks, by which time nine out of ten had answered themselves, or had been answered by history. Coleridge’s plan—says De Quincey—was shorter; he opened none, and answered none. To answer all forthwith was the habit of Southey. Thinking doubtless of their differences in such minor moralities of life, Coleridge writes of his brother-in-law:—“Always employed, his friends find him always at leisure. No less punctual in trifles than steadfast in the performance of highest duties, he inflicts none of those small pains which irregular men scatter about them, and which in the aggregate so often become formidable obstacles both to happiness and utility; while, on the contrary, he bestows all the pleasures and inspires all that ease of mind on those around or connected with him, which perfect consistency and (if such a word might be framed) absolute reliability, equally in small as in great concerns, cannot but inspire and bestow; when this, too, is softened without being weakened by kindness and gentleness.” Odd indeed wore some of the communications for which the poet-laureate, the Tory reformer, and the loyal son of the Church was the mark. Now a clergyman writes to furnish him with Scriptural illustrations of Thalaba; now another clergyman favours him with an ingenious parallel between Kehama and Nebuchadnezzar; now some anonymous person seriously urges on Southey his duty of making a new version of the Psalms, and laying it before the King to be approved and appointed to be sung in churches; now a lunatic poet desires his brother to procure for his title-page the names of Messrs. Longman and Rees; now a poor woman, wife to a blind Homer, would have him led carefully to the summit of Parnassus; now a poor French devil volunteers to translate Roderick if the author will have the goodness to send him a copy—even a defective copy—which he pledges himself religiously to return; now a Yankee, who keeps an exhibition at Philadelphia, modestly asks for Southey’s painted portrait, “which is very worthy a place in my collection;” now a herdsman in the vale of Clwyd requests permission to send specimens of prose and verse—his highest ambition is the acquaintance of learned men; now the Rev. Peter Hall begs to inform Southey that he has done more harm to the cause of religion than any writer of the age; now a lover requests him to make an acrostic on the name of a young lady—the lover’s rival has beaten him in writing verses; enclosed is the honorarium. Southey’s amiability at this point gave way; he did not write the acrostic, and the money he spent on blankets for poor women in Keswick. A society for the suppression of albums was proposed by Southey; yet sometimes he was captured in the gracious mood. Samuel Simpson, of Liverpool, begs for a few lines in his handwriting “to fill a vacancy in his collection of autographs, without which his series must remain for ever most incomplete.” The laureate replies:

Some of Southey’s distractions were of his own inviting. Soon after his arrival at Keswick, a tiny volume of poems entitled Clifton Grove, attracted his attention; its author was an undergraduate of Cambridge. The Monthly Review having made the discovery that it rhymed in one place boy and sky, dismissed the book contemptuously. Southey could not bear to think that the hopes of a lad of promise should be blasted, and he wrote to Henry Kirke White, encouraging him, and offering him help towards a future volume. The cruel dulness of the reviewer sat heavily on the poor boy’s spirits, and these unexpected words of cheer came with most grateful effect. It soon appeared, however, that Southey’s services must be slight, for his new acquaintance was taken out of his hands by Mr. Simeon, the nursing-father of Evangelicalism. At no time had Southey any leanings towards the Clapham Sect; and so, while he tried to be of use to Kirke White indirectly, their correspondence ceased. When the lad, in every way lacking pith and substance, and ripening prematurely in a heated atmosphere, drooped and died, Southey was not willing that he should be altogether forgotten; he wrote offering to look over whatever papers there might be, and to give an opinion on them. “Down came a box-full,” he tells Duppa, “the sight of which literally made my heart ache and my eyes overflow, for never did I behold such proofs of human industry. To make short, I took the matter up with interest, collected his letters, and have, at the expense of more time than such a poor fellow as myself can very well afford, done what his family are very grateful for, and what I think the world will thank me for too. Of course I have done it gratuitously.... That I should become, and that voluntarily too, an editor of Methodistical and Calvinistic letters, is a thing which, when I think of, excites the same sort of smile that the thought of my pension does.” A brief statement that his own views on religion differed widely from those of Kirke White sufficed to save Southey’s integrity. The genius of the dead poet he overrated; it was an error which the world has since found time to correct.

This was but one of a series of many instances in which Southey, stemming the pressure of his own engagements, asserted the right to be generous of his time and strength and substance to those who had need of such help as a sound heart and a strong arm can give. William Roberts, a Bristol bank-clerk, dying of consumption at nineteen, left his only possession, some manuscript poems, in trust to be published for the benefit of a sister whom he passionately loved. Southey was consulted, and at once bestirred himself on behalf of the projected volume. Herbert Knowles, an orphan lad at school in Yorkshire, had hoped to go as a sizar to St. John’s; his relations were unable to send him; could he help himself by publishing a poem? might he dedicate it to the laureate? The poem came to Southey, who found it “brimful of power and of promise;” he represented to Herbert the folly of publishing, promised ten pounds himself, and procured from Rogers and Earl Spencer twenty more. Herbert Knowles, in a wise and manly letter, begged that great things might not be expected of him; he would not be idle, his University career should be at least respectable:—“Suffice it, then, to say, I thank you from my heart; let time and my future conduct tell the rest.” Death came to arbitrate between his hopes and fears. James Dusautoy, another schoolboy, one of ten children of a retired officer, sent specimens of his verse, asking Southey’s opinion on certain poetical plans. His friends thought the law the best profession for him; how could he make literature help him forward in his profession? Southey again advised against publication, but by a well-timed effort enabled him to enter Emanuel College. Dusautoy, after a brilliant promise, took fever, died, and was buried, in acknowledgment of his character and talents, in the college cloisters. When at Harrogate in the summer of 1827, Southey received a letter, written with much modesty and good feeling, from John Jones, an old serving-man; he enclosed a poem on “The Redbreast,” and would take the liberty, if permitted, to offer other manuscripts for inspection. Touches of true observation and natural feeling in the verses on the little bird with “look oblique and prying head and gentle affability” pleased Southey, and he told his humble applicant to send his manuscript book, warning him, however, not to expect that such poems would please the public—“the time for them was gone by, and whether the public had grown wiser in these matters or not, it had certainly become less tolerant and less charitable.” By procuring subscribers and himself contributing an Introductory Essay on the lives and works of our Uneducated Poets, Southey secured a slender fortune for the worthy old man, who laid the table none the less punctually because he loved Shakespeare and the Psalter, or carried in his head some simple rhymes of his own. It pleased Southey to show how much intellectual pleasure and moral improvement connected with such pleasure are within reach of the humblest; thus a lesson was afforded to those who would have the March of Intellect beaten only to the tune of Ça ira. “Before I conclude”—so the Introduction draws to an end—“I must, in my own behalf, give notice to all whom it may concern that I, Robert Southey, Poet-laureate, being somewhat advanced in years, and having business enough of my own fully to occupy as much time as can be devoted to it, consistently with a due regard to health, do hereby decline perusing or inspecting any manuscript from any person whatsoever, and desire that no application on that score may be made to me from this time forth; this resolution, which for most just cause is taken and here notified, being, like the laws of the Medes and the Persians, not to be changed.”

It was some time after this public announcement that a hand, which may have trembled while yet it was very brave and resolute, dropped into the little post-office at Haworth, in Yorkshire, a packet for Robert Southey. His bold truthfulness, his masculine self-control, his strong heart, his domestic temper sweet and venerable, his purity of manners, a certain sweet austerity, attracted to him women of fine sensibility and genius who would fain escape from their own falterings and temerities under the authority of a faithful director. Already Maria del Occidente, “the most impassioned and most imaginative of all poetesses,” had poured into his ear the tale of her slighted love. Newly come from Paris, and full of enthusiasm for the Poles, she hastened to Keswick to see in person her sympathetic adviser; she proved, says Southey, a most interesting person of the mildest and gentlest manners. With him she left, on returning to America, her Zophiel in manuscript, the publication of which he superintended. “Zophiel, Southey says, is by some Yankee woman”—Charles Lamb breaks forth—“as if there ever had been a woman capable of anything so great!” Now, in 1837, a woman of finer spirit, and capable of higher things than Zophiel, addressed a letter to Robert Southey, asking his judgment of her powers as disclosed in the poems which she forwarded. For some weeks Charlotte BrontË waited, until almost all hope of a reply was lost. At length the verdict came. Charlotte BrontË’s verse was assuredly written with her left hand; her passionate impulses, crossed and checked by fiery fiats of the will, would not mould themselves into little stanzas; the little stanzas must be correct, therefore they must reject such irregular heavings and swift repressions of the heart. Southey’s delay in replying had been caused by absence from home. A little personal knowledge of a poet in the decline of life might have tempered her enthusiasm; yet he is neither a disappointed nor a discontented man; she will never hear from him any chilling sermons on the text. All is vanity; the faculty of verse she possesses in no inconsiderable degree; but this, since the beginning of the century, has grown to be no rare possession; let her beware of making literature her profession, check day-dreams, and find her chief happiness in her womanly duties; then she may write poetry for its own sake, not in a spirit of emulation, not through a passion for celebrity; the less celebrity is aimed at, the more it is likely to be deserved. “Mr. Southey’s letter,” said Charlotte BrontË, many years later, “was kind and admirable, a little stringent, but it did me good.” She wrote again, striving to repress a palpitating joy and pride in the submission to her director’s counsel, and the sacrifice of her cherished hopes; telling him more of her daily life, of her obedience to the day’s duty, her efforts to be sensible and sober: “I had not ventured,” she says, “to hope for such a reply—so considerate in its tone, so noble in its spirit.” Once more Southey wrote, hoping that she would let him see her at the Lakes: “You would then think of me afterwards with the more good-will, because you would perceive that there is neither severity nor moroseness in the state of mind to which years and observation have brought me.... And now, madam, God bless you. Farewell, and believe me to be your sincere friend, Robert Southey.” It was during a visit to the Lakes that Charlotte BrontË told her biographer of these letters. But Southey lay at rest in Crosthwaite churchyard.

“My days among the dead are past”—Southey wrote, but it is evident that the living, and not those of his own household alone, claimed no inconsiderable portion of his time. Indeed, it would not be untrue to assert that few men have been more genuinely and consistently social, that few men ever yielded themselves more constantly to the pleasures of companionship. But the society he loved best was that of old and chosen friends, or if new friends, one at a time, and only one. Next to romping with my children, he said, I enjoy a tÊte-À-tÊte conversation with an old friend or a new. “With one I can talk of familiar subjects which we have discussed in former years, and with the other, if he have any brains, I open what to me is a new mine of thought.” Miscellaneous company to a certain extent disordered and intoxicated him. He felt no temptation to say a great deal, but he would often say things strongly and emphatically, which were better left unsaid. “In my hearty hatred of assentation I commit faults of the opposite kind. Now I am sure to find this out myself, and to get out of humour with myself; what prudence I have is not ready on demand; and so it is that the society of any except my friends, though it may be sweet in the mouth, is bitter in the belly.” When Coleridge, in their arguments, allowed him a word, Southey made up in weight for what was wanting in measure; he saw one fact quickly, and darted at it like a greyhound. De Quincey has described his conversation as less flowing and expansive than that of Wordsworth—more apt to clothe itself in a keen, sparkling, aphoristic form; consequently sooner coming to an abrupt close; “the style of his mind naturally prompts him to adopt a trenchant, pungent, aculeated form of terse, glittering, stenographic sentences—sayings which have the air of laying down the law without any locus penitentiÆ or privilege of appeal, but are not meant to do so.” The same manner, tempered and chastened by years, can be recognized in the picture of Southey drawn by his friend Sir Henry Taylor:—

How deep and rich Southey’s social nature was, his published correspondence, some four or five thousand printed pages, tells sufficiently. These letters, addressed, for the most part, to good old friends, are indeed genial, liberal of sympathy, and expecting sympathy in return; pleasantly egotistic, grave, playful, wise, pathetic, with a kind of stringent pathos showing through checks imposed by the wiser and stronger will. Southey did not squander abroad the treasures of his affection. To lavish upon casual acquaintance the outward and visible signs of friendship seemed to him a profaning of the mystery of manly love. “Your feelings,” he writes to Coleridge, “go naked; I cover mine with a bear-skin; I will not say that you harden yours by your mode, but I am sure that mine are the warmer for their clothing.” With strangers a certain neutral courtesy served to protect his inner self like the low leaves of his own holly-tree:

but to those of whose goodness and love he was well assured, there were no protecting spines:

“Old friends and old books,” he says, “are the best things that this world affords (I like old wine also), and in these I am richer than most men (the wine excepted).” In the group of Southey’s friends, what first strikes one is, not that they are men of genius—although the group includes Wordsworth, and Scott, and Henry Taylor—but that they are good men. No one believed more thoroughly than Southey that goodness is a better thing than genius; yet he required in his associates some high excellence, extraordinary kindness of disposition or strength of moral character, if not extraordinary intellect. To knit his friends in a circle was his ardent desire; in the strength of his affections time and distance made no change. An old College friend, Lightfoot, to visit Southey, made the longest journey of his life; it was eight-and-twenty years since they had met. When their hands touched, Lightfoot trembled like an aspen-leaf. “I believe,” says Southey, “no men ever met more cordially after so long a separation, or enjoyed each other’s society more. I shall never forget the manner in which he first met me, nor the tone in which he said ‘that, having now seen me, he should return home and die in peace.’” But of all friends he was most at ease with his dear Dapple, Grosvenor Bedford, who suited for every mood of mirth and sorrow. When Mrs. Southey had fallen into her sad decay, and the once joyous house was melancholy and silent, Southey turned for comfort to Bedford. Still, some of their Rabelaisian humour remained, and all their warmth of brotherly affection. “My father,” says Cuthbert Southey, “was never tired of talking into Mr. Bedford’s trumpet.” And in more joyous days, what noise and nonsense did they not make! “Oh! Grosvenor,” exclaims Southey, “is it not a pity that two men who love nonsense so cordially and naturally and bonÂfidically as you and I, should be three hundred miles asunder? For my part, I insist upon it that there is no sense so good as your honest, genuine nonsense.”

A goodly company of friends becomes familiar to us as we read Southey’s correspondence:—Wynn, wherever he was, “always doing something else,” yet able, in the midst of politics and business, to find time to serve an old schoolfellow; Rickman, full of practical suggestions, and accurate knowledge and robust benevolence; John May, unfailing in kindness and fidelity; Lamb for play and pathos, and subtle criticism glancing amid the puns; William Taylor for culture and literary theory, and paradox and polysyllables; Landor for generous admiration, and kindred enthusiasms and kindred prejudices; Elmsley, and Lightfoot, and Danvers for love and happy memories; Senhora Barker, the Bhow Begum, for frank familiarities, and warm, womanly services; Caroline Bowles for rarer sympathy and sacreder hopes and fears; Henry Taylor for spiritual sonship, as of a son who is also an equal; and Grosvenor Bedford for everything great and small, glad and sad, wise and foolish.

No literary rivalries or jealousies ever interrupted for a moment any friendship of Southey. Political and religious differences, which in strangers were causes of grave offence, seemed to melt away when the heretic or erring statist was a friend. But if success, fashion, flattery, tested a man, and proved him wanting, as seemed to be the case with Humphry Davy, his affection grew cold; and an habitual dereliction of social duty, such as that of Coleridge, could not but transform Southey’s feeling of love to one of condemning sorrow. To his great contemporaries, Scott, Landor, Wordsworth, his admiration was freely given. “Scott,” he writes, “is very ill. He suffers dreadfully, but bears his sufferings with admirable equanimity.... God grant that he may recover! He is a noble and generous-hearted creature, whose like we shall not look upon again.” Of Wordsworth:—“A greater poet than Wordsworth there never has been, nor ever will be.” “Two or three generations must pass before the public affect to admire such poets as Milton and Wordsworth. Of such men the world scarcely produces one in a millennium.” With indignation crossed by a gleam of humour, he learnt that Ebenezer Elliott, his pupil in the art of verse, had stepped forward as the lyrist of radicalism; but the feeling could not be altogether anger with which he remembered that earnest face, once seen by him at a Sheffield inn, its pale grey eyes full of fire and meaning, its expression suiting well with Elliott’s frankness of manner and simplicity of character. William Taylor was one of the liberals of liberal Norwich, and dangled abroad whatever happened to be the newest paradox in religion. But neither his radicalism, nor his Pyrrhonism, nor his paradoxes, could estrange Southey. The last time the oddly-assorted pair met was in Taylor’s house; the student of German criticism had found some theological novelty, and wished to draw his guest into argument; Southey parried the thrusts good-humouredly, and at last put an end to them with the words, “Taylor, come and see me at Keswick. We will ascend Skiddaw, where I shall have you nearer heaven, and we will then discuss such questions as these.”

In the year 1823 one of his oldest friends made a public attack on Southey, and that friend the gentlest and sweetest-natured of them all. In a Quarterly article Southey had spoken of the Essays of Elia as a book which wanted only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it was original. He had intended to alter the expression in the proof-sheet, but no proof-sheet was ever sent. Lamb, already pained by references to his writings in the Quarterly, some of which he erroneously ascribed to Southey, was deeply wounded. “He might have spared an old friend such a construction of a few careless flights that meant no harm to religion.” A long expostulation addressed by Elia to Robert Southey, Esq., appeared in the London Magazine for October, only a portion of which is retained in the Elia Essays under the title of “The Tombs of the Abbey;” for though Lamb had playfully repented Coleridge’s salutation, “my gentle-hearted Charles,” his heart was indeed gentle, and could not endure the pain of its own wrath; among the memorials of the dead in Westminster he finds his right mind, his truer self, once more; he forgets the grave aspect with which Southey looked awful on his poor friend, and spends his indignation harmless as summer lightning over the heads of a Dean and Chapter. Southey, seeing the announcement of letter addressed to him by Lamb, had expected a sheaf of friendly pleasantries; with surprise he learnt what pain his words had caused. He hastened to explain; had Lamb intimated his feelings in private, he would have tried, by a passage in the ensuing Quarterly, to efface the impression unhappily created; he ended with a declaration of unchanged affection, and a proposal to call on Lamb. “On my part,” Southey said, “there was not even a momentary feeling of anger;” he at once understood the love, the error, the soreness, and the repentance awaiting a being so composed of goodness as Elia. “Dear Southey”—runs the answer of Lamb—“the kindness of your note has melted away the mist that was upon me. I have been fighting against a shadow.... I wish both magazine and review were at the bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed to see you, and my sister (though innocent) will be still more so, for this folly was done without her knowledge, and has made her uneasy ever since. My guardian angel was absent at the time. I will make up courage to see you, however, any day next week. We shall hope that you will bring Edith with you. That will be a second mortification; she will hate to see us; but come and heap embers; we deserve it, I for what I have done, and she for being my sister. Do come early in the day, by sunlight that you may see my Milton.... Your penitent C. Lamb.”

At Bristol, in 1808, Southey met for the first time the man of all others whom he most desired to see, the only man living, he says, “of whose praise I was ambitious, of whose censure would have humbled me.” This was Walter Savage Landor. Madoc, on which Southey had build his hope of renown as a poet, had been published, and had been coldly received; Kehama, which had been begun consequently now stood still. Their author could indeed, as he told Sir George Beaumont, be contented with posthumous fame, but it was impossible to be contented with posthumous bread and cheese. “St. Cecilia herself could not have played the organ if there had been nobody to blow the bellows for her.” At this moment, when he turned sadly and bravely from poetry to more profitable work, he first looked on Landor. “I never saw any one more unlike myself,” he writes, “in every prominent part of human character, nor any one who so cordially and instinctively agreed with me on so many of the most important subjects. I have often said before we met, that I would walk forty miles to see him, and having seen him, I would gladly walk fourscore to see him again. He talked of Thalaba, and I told him of the series of mythological poems which I had planned, ... and also told him for what reason they had been laid aside; in plain English, that I could not afford to write them. Landor’s reply was, ‘Go on with them, and I will pay for printing them, as many as you will write, and as many copies as you please.’” The princely offer stung Southey, as he says, to the very core; not that he thought of accepting that offer, but the generous words were themselves a deed, and claimed a return. He rose earlier each morning to carry on his Kehama, without abstracting time from better-paid task-work; it advanced, and duly as each section of this poem, and subsequently of his Roderick, came to be written, it was transcribed for the friend whose sympathy and admiration were a golden reward. To be praised by one’s peers is indeed happiness. Landor, liberal of applause, was keen in suggestion and exact in censure. Both friends were men of ardent feelings, though one had tamed himself, while the other never could be tamed; both often gave their feelings a vehement utterance. On many matters they thought, in the main, alike—on the grand style in human conduct, on the principles of the poetic art, on Spanish affairs, on Catholicism. The secret of Landor’s high-poised dignity in verse had been discovered by Southey; he, like Landor, aimed at a classical purity of diction; he, like Landor, loved, as a shaper of imaginative forms, to embody in an act, or an incident, the virtue of some eminent moment of human passion, and to give it fixity by sculptured phrase; only the repression of a fiery spirit is more apparent in Landor’s monumental lines than in Southey’s. With certain organic resemblances, and much community of sentiment, there were large differences between the two, so that when they were drawn together in sympathy, each felt as if he had annexed a new province. Landor rejoiced that the first persons who shared his turret at Llanthony were Southey and his wife; again, in 1817, the two friends were together for three days at Como, after Southey had endured his prime affliction—the death of his son:—

Two years later the warm-hearted friend writes from Pistoia, rejoicing in Southey’s joy: “Thank God! Tears came into my eyes on seeing that you were blessed with a son.” To watch the happiness of children was Landor’s highest delight; to share in such happiness was Southey’s; and Arnold and Cuthbert formed a new bond between their fathers. In 1836, when Southey, in his sixty-third year, guided his son through the scenes of his boyhood, several delightful days were spent at Clifton with Landor. I never knew a man of brighter genius or of kinder heart, said Southey; and of Landor in earlier years:—“He does more than any of the gods of all my mythologies, for his very words are thunder and lightning—such is the power and splendour with which they burst out.” Landor responded with a majestic enthusiasm about his friend, who seemed to him no less noble a man than admirable a writer:

That “Well done” greeted Southey many years before Landor’s imperial head was laid low. In the last letter from his friend received by Southey—already the darkness was fast closing in—he writes, “If any man living is ardent for your welfare, I am; whose few and almost worthless merits your generous heart has always overvalued, and whose infinite and great faults it has been too ready to overlook. I will write to you often, now I learn that I may do it inoffensively; well remembering that among the names you have exalted is Walter Landor.” Alas! to reply was now beyond the power of Southey; still, he held Gebir in his hands oftener than any other volume of poetry, and, while thought and feeling lived, fed upon its beauty. “It is very seldom now,” Caroline Southey wrote at a later date, “that he ever names any person: but this morning, before he left his bed, I heard him repeating softly to himself, Landor, ay, Landor.”

“If it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all”—this was ever present to Southey during the happy days of labour and rest in Greta Hall. While he was disposing his books so as to make the comeliest show, and delighting in their goodly ranks; while he looked into the radiant faces of his children, and loved their innocent brightness, he yet knew that the day of detachment was approaching. There was nothing in such a thought which stirred Southey to a rebellious mood; had he not set his seal to the bond of life? How his heart rested in his home, only his own words can tell; even a journey to London seemed too long:—“Oh dear; oh dear! there is such a comfort in one’s old coat and old shoes, one’s own chair and own fireside, one’s own writing-desk and own library—with a little girl climbing up to my neck, and saying, ‘Don’t go to London, papa—you must stay with Edith;’ and a little boy, whom I have taught to speak the language of cats, dogs, cuckoos, and jackasses, etc., before he can articulate a word of his own;—there is such a comfort in all these things, that transportation to London for four or five weeks seems a heavier punishment than any sins of mine deserve.” Nor did his spirit of boyish merriment abate until overwhelming sorrow weighed him down:—“I am quite as noisy as I ever was,” he writes to Lightfoot, “and should take as much delight as ever in showering stones through the hole of the staircase against your room door, and hearing with what hearty good earnest ‘you fool’ was vociferated in indignation against me in return. Oh, dear Lightfoot, what a blessing it is to have a boy’s heart! it is as great a blessing in carrying one through this world, as to have a child’s spirit will be in fitting us for the next.” But Southey’s light-heartedness was rounded by a circle of earnest acquiescence in the law of mortal life; a clear-obscure of faith as pure and calm and grave as the heavens of a midsummer night. At thirty he writes:—“No man was ever more contented with his lot than I am, for few have ever had more enjoyments, and none had ever better or worthier hopes. Life, therefore, is sufficiently dear to me, and long life desirable, that I may accomplish all which I design. But yet I could be well content that the next century were over, and my part fairly at an end, having been gone well through. Just as at school one wished the school-days over, though we were happy enough there, because we expected more happiness and more liberty when we were to be our own masters, might lie as much later in the morning as we pleased, have no bounds and do no exercise—just so do I wish that my exercises were over.” At thirty-five:—“Almost the only wish I ever give utterance to is that the next hundred years were over. It is not that the uses of this world seem to me weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable—God knows far otherwise! No man can be better contented with his lot. My paths are paths of pleasantness.... Still, the instability of human happiness is ever before my eyes; I long for the certain and the permanent.” “My notions about life are much the same as they are about travelling—there is a good deal of amusement on the road, but, after all, one wants to be at rest.” At forty:—“My disposition is invincibly cheerful, and this alone would make me a cheerful man if I were not so from the tenor of my life; yet I doubt whether the strictest Carthusian has the thought of death more habitually in his mind.”

Such was Southey’s constant temper: to some persons it may seem an unfortunate one; to some it may be practically unintelligible. But those who accept of the feast of life freely, who enter with a bounding foot its measures of beauty and of joy—glad to feel all the while the serviceable sackcloth next the skin—will recognize in Southey an instructed brother of the Renunciauts’ rule.