in performing one act of grace at least during this short
tenure of office. He oflFered him £300 a-year from the
Civil List Pension Fund, which he granted on " a public
principle, the recognition of literary eminence as a public
claim." This timely assurance of a definite income
relieved Southey from all future anxiety respecting the
supply of his daily necessities. It rendered him also
independent of the publishers; and he congratulated
himself on being able henceforth to devote himself entirely
to his great works, and in particular to his " History of
Portugal;" and to partake of his favourite relaxation of
travel whenever failing health demanded it.

After Mrs. Southey had been about a year at York,
she was so far recovered as to make her return home
a desirable step. " If her illusions," writes her husband,
" are like dreams to her, the reality is like a dream to
me, but one from which there is no awaking." He
devoted himself to her care with a sorrowful satisfaction.
He was not one to shrink from an obligation, and devolve
upon his daughters or dependants a task he deemed it was
his more especial duty to undertake. She had made it the
pride of her life to minister to him in his health, he would
minister to her in her helplessness ; and all that human
concern could do, he did, to alleviate her hapless condition.

In the summer of 1836 his old schoolfellow Grosvenor
Bedford, accompanied by his niece, stayed with him ; and
although his visitor was almost deaf, they managed to
have much talk of old times. They had been acquainted
from 1788, familiar from 1790, intimate from 1791-
Rev. Edward Levett, another Westminster contemporary,
visited him likewise at the same time. At the summer
assizes this year he was subpoenaed with other literary men
to appear as a witness, on a celebrated will case then
pending, involving the Castle Hornby estate, of from



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ROBEKT SOUTHEY. 387

£6000 to £7000 a-year. His assiduity towards his afflicted
wife had prevented him from taking his accustomed
recreation, and he embraced the occasion of this com-
pulsory absence, to make, in company with his son, a
rapid trip to the West of England. He visited, with
childish curiosity, all his old haunts ; the house in which
he was born, the schools to which he had been sent, the
church, Miss Tyler's house: Martin Hall, his former
abode at Westbury, he was unable to recognise. During
these researches, his friend Walter Savage Landor was
an unfailing companion.

On the 16th November, 1837, his wife died. For some
time previously she had been daily sinking, and the last
glimmer of consciousness seemed to be the assurance
that she was tended by those who best loved her. During
the three years she had laboured under her affliction, the
anxieties of Southey had been relieved by the exertions
they occasioned. The performance of those duties which,
as a husband, he conceived it would have been selfish and
unworthy to relegate to others, had diverted his mind from
brooding over his increasing calamities. But when the
solemn blank in his home and heart, caused by the be-
reavement, first presented itself broadly to his feelings, his
spirit sank within him, and he felt in truth that " the life
of his life" had departed. His accustomed occupations
aflForded not the relief one would have expected they would
have done from his habits and manners. The bride of
his youth, the companion of his manhood ; she had shared
all his joys, had alleviated all his sorrows. With her,
happen what might, there was hope; without her, what
worth hoping for? It was too late now to begin the
journey of life afresh — there was no inspiration in the
fiiture, and the past was a vanished dream. But what had
already transpired was but as the rehearsal of another and
similar tragedy. Mental anxiety had unhinged the faculties

c c 2

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388 ROBERT SOUTHEY.

of the wife, over-exertion prostrated those of the husband.
The first indications of imbecility were so slight, the ap-
proaches so gradual, that they escaped the attention of his
nearest friends* Failure of memory, confusion of time and
place, starts of irritability so foreign to his nature, these
were all overlooked at the time, but too fidthfiilly remem-
bered when the appalling reality broke upon them.

In the ktter end of 1838, he was^ urged to undertake a
short trip on the continent ; and a party of six met in
London, and started on a tour through Normandy and
Brittany. On their return to England, they separated;
his son, who had been one of the party, proceeding to
Oxford ; and Southey purposing to stay at Buckland, the
residence of Miss Caroline Bowles, on his way home.
He afterwards proceeded to London, and the change in his
condition became painfuDy perceptible. It was hoped,
however, that the derangement might be but temporary,
and that his faculties would be re-invigorated by repose ;
but the bow had lost its spring, tlie tendon was too fretted
to be re-braced. He ceased from his labours — with him
how sad a proof of sheer inability to proceed ! — the over-
tasked brain refused all further exercise, the hand declined
for ever its habitual occupation.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the alienation of mind
became complete. Still would he wander among his
books, and fix a vacant gaze on those changdei^ friends
of iSfty years ; take down from its shelf some well-worn
volume, and tenderly replace it; and long he continued
mechanically to read, after all power of comprehension was
gone. Still, too, viaons of great works yet unaccom-
plished floated across his phantasy. '^ The History of the
Monastic Orders," " The Doctor/' and above all, " The
History of Portugal." This, the darling dream of his
life — the first high effort he had meditated in boyhood
among the beauties of the dime it was to celebrate — " the



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ROBERT SOUTHEY. 389

Doric monument of eternal durability" that should fix his
name imperishably in the world's annals — was still a
dream — a promise unfulfilled. We need not linger over
the sad picture. He gradually became weaker and
weaker, and died, after a short fever, on the 21st March)
1843.

They laid him in the quiet churchyard at Crosthwaite,
within the shadow of the home he loved so w^. And
not alone, for by his side rests sleeping his gentle, his
all-trusting Edith. They were as one in life, in death
they are not divided. There, too, are the children, who,
ere soiled by sin or sorrow, preceded to their blissfid beati-
tude, to give him welcome when his toil should be over.
Cities may rear their votive tablets to his memory, but
his remains could not have a more appropriate resting-
place.

It would be incommensurate with the plan of this work
to give any detailed account of Southey's literary labours.
His writings alone constitute a library. We reckon forty-
five independent works, one hundred and twenty-six
articles in the " Quarterly,^' and fifly-two in the " Annual
Review." The historical part of "The Edinburgh
Annual Register" for 1 808 and the two following years
was by him; and innumerable other pieces, scattered
over various periodical publications, proceeded from his
indefatigable pen. Will the prize be his he so ardently
coveted? In early life he beheld, in a dream, "the
Elysium of the Poets, and that more sacred part of it in
which Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Spenser, Camoens, and
Milton were assembled. While I was regarding them,"
he wrote, " Fame came hurrying by, with her arm full of
laurels, and asking, in an indignant voice, if there was no
poet who would deserve them ? Upon which I reached
out my hand, snatched at them, and awoke." Later he
observed : " One overwhelming propensity has formed my

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390 ROBERT SOUTHEY.

destiny, and marred all prospects of rank and wealth ;
but it has made me happy, and it will make me im-
mortal."

We may not antedate the decision of posterity, but we
think the dream of the boy a safer omen than the
assimiption of the man. Nature had gifted him with
unparalleled facility — alike his blessing and his bane. Its
effect is conspicuous in all he accomplished — epic, essay,
history — of all the most alluring charm, and the most
fatal defect. The poems he blushed not to compare with
" Paradise Lost ;" the histories he delivered to the world
"in full reliance of the approbation of those ages to
which they were bequeathed," are long narrative pieces,
invented and compiled too often with little judgment,
by a consummate master of language, and unalluring
from the remoteness of their subject-matter. " The value
of an historical work" he deemed " to be in proportion to
the store of facts which it first embodied :" and under
this fatal misconception, his ponderous quartos increased in
bulk, and he fancied that, while recapitulating incidents,
he was writing history.

Thus his histories are mere specimens of prose narra-
tive, manufactured, like his epics, by daily process. His
system of reading and writing was so unremitting and so
unvaried, that his mind at last resembled a machine,
capable of turning out its required piecework, with me-
chanical regularity. His reflective faculty was deficient in
power, because he never exercised it. Living apart from
the world, he studied not man in his actions, and his
perpetual reading left him no time to study human nature
in himself; and thus his history is deficient in the deeper
and more essential elements, and while poring over his
prolonged pages, we sigh for the masterly portraiture of
Clarendon, or the wide and vigorous grasp of thought
that informs the great production of Gibbon.



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ROBERT SOUTHEY. 391

His qualities as a poet were of a high order, but not of
the highest. He possessed great imaginative power, his
language is clear and vigorous, free from vagueness and
the shallow affectation of proifundity, while the elaboitite
machinery of the ancient mythologies he handles with
a Titan's grasp. But through all his efforts, there is
a something wanting which is indescribable, but which
is the soul of poetry. They are but as the lifeless copy,
which we leave for the breathing original. ItT is the
presence of this element, which in spite of their defects
will render immortal the writings of his gifted antagonist
Lord Byron, those writings which express most tersely
the exaggerated passion of a wonderful epoch, and con-
stitute our true " revolutionary epic."

And yet, no writer ever had a higher opinion of his own
capacity. This self-confidence breaks out perpetually
through the entire range of his correspondence. Writing
in his twenty-seventh year, he says : " In literatpre, as in
the playthings of schoolboys, and the frippery of women,
there are the ins and outs of fashion. Sonnets and
satires have their day — and my * Joan of Arc' has revived
the Epomania that Boileau cured the French of 120
years ago ; but it is not every one that can shoot with the
bow of Ulysses, and the gentlemen who think they can
bend the bow because I make the string twang, will find
themselves somewhat disappointed." Of "Thalaba" he
says : " Such as it is, I know no poem which can claim a
place between it and the ' Orlando.' Let it be weighed
with the ' Oberon ;' perhaps were I to speak out, I should
not dread a trial with Ariosto ; my proportion of ore
to dross is greater."

Writing some years later of "Madoc," he observes:
" Taylor has said, it is the best English poem that has left
the press since the ' Paradise Lost' — indeed this is not
exaggerated praise, for unfortunately there is no com-



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392 ROBERT SOUTHEY.

petition." Later still we read: "If I do hot greatly
deceive myself, my * History of Portugal' will be one
of the most curious books of its kind that has ever
appeared ;" and of the Brazilians, he affirms, that his
history of their country would " be to them what the
work of Herodotus is to Europe." Failure only made
him hug the closer this deluding support. If a book
fell still-born from the press, the fault lay not with th^
writer, but in the obtuseness of the readers ; another
generation would discern its merit. A little reflection
might have dissipated much of this egotistical vanity.
It reveals the secret of the pertinacious ridicule and oppo-
sition he experienced through life; perhaps it is the
sole secret of . Lord Byron's contemptuous hatred. But
though it produced him much annoyance and ill-will,
it occasioned probably a far larger counterbalance of happi-
ness : and if the nerve be too delicate to bear the sharp
light of ^ truth, let the blind man dream on in his
blindness.

To his periodical writings too much praise cannot be
given. Easy and flowing, they were exactly adapted to
their end, not tasking the mind by any severe ratiocination
or profound disquisition, but evolving the different bearings
of the subject with pliancy and address, and free from
the miserable flippancy some reviewers so marvellously
mistake for wit. They were his most popular essays,
but he regretted the labour they required, and grudged
every moment of time that was not devoted to writing for
some future and imaginary public. A proposal was once
made to him, that he should superintend " The Times"
newspaper. The remuneration offered was on the most
liberal scale. It is seldom any want of discernment is
manifested on such a subject in that quarter, and we think
it would have been Southey's proper sphere. His laborious
industry would have been beneficially exerted in a noble



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ROBERT southey; 393

field. A manly and generous tone would have charac-
terized the paper, and his articles would have been of
the very highest newspaper merit. But a post of such
importance, and the exercise of so vast an instrumentality,
presented no temptation to his ambition. His efforts
there would have been necessarily ephemeral, whereas he
wrote for fame. We question if such aspirants ever
obtain their desired reward.

" Nor Fame I slight, nor for her faronrs call :
She comes tmlooked-for, if she comes at slII'*

Thus sang one who has secured the guerdon. Had Homer
been apprehensive about his fame, the world would never
have been charmed with the " Iliad."

We have already noticed his want of self-concentration
This abeyance of the reflective faculty will aid in explain-
ing the absurd extravagance of his earlier political views ;
it will detract, we fear, from the merit of his later labours
in the cause of constitutional government. He waf swayed
primarily by the feelings. When once a cause had taken
hold of his heart, he then sought for arguments to enforce
it, and urged his convictions with a zeal glowing as with
the warmth of personal interest. This will also explain
his aversion to scientific pursuits, and his dislike of scientific
men, notwithstanding his life-long friendship with Sir
Humphrey Davy, and others. " Generally speaking," he
says, " I have little liking for men of science ; their
pursuits serve to deaden the imagination and harden the
heart ; they are so accustomed to analyze and anatomatize
everything, to understand or fancy they understand what-
ever comes before them, that they frequently become mere
materialists ; account for everything by mechanism and
motion ; and would put out of the world all that makes
the world endurable. I do not undervalue their knowledge
nor the utility of their discoveries, but I . do not like the
men. My own nature requires something more than they

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394 ROBERT SOUTHEY.

teach, it pants after things unseen." There may be truth
in the above extract, there must be error.

In person he was above the middle height, with dark
brown eyes, abundant hair, large arched eyebrows, and
prominent mouth. His exterior was prepossessing. " To
have his head and shoulders," said Lord Byron, with
amusing flippancy, '^ I would almost have written his
* Sapphics.' " His manners were gentle, and free from all
eccentricity. He was open and unconstrained in conver-
sation among friends, though generally silent in mixed
society. He disliked arguing, was tender of the feelings
of others, and directed his attention to the subjects of
conversation rather than the persons with whom he was
conversing.

His house was his workshop. He ate, slept, lived
amid his tools. Six or seven hundred volumes crowded
his bed-room ; upwards of two thousand adorned his
sitting-Aom. This room was his favourite, the scene of
his greatest labours. Here we see him day after day at
his desk, " working hard and getting little — a bare main-
tenance, and hardly that ; writing poems and history for
posterity with his whole heart and soul ; one daily pro-
gressing in learning, not so learned as he is poor, not so
poor as proud, not so proud as happy." He was always
collecting. Passages and attics were gradually filled with
his accumulating volumes, which swelled at last to the
number of fourteen thousand. One apartment was appro-
priated to old and disfigured books. These were carefully
covered with cotton by the ladies of the house, who
indulged their taste, their criticism, or their humour in
the selection of the colours and patterns; enveloping a
Quaker's book in drab, and so on. This room was
jocosely called the Cottonian Library.

His method was peculiar. On the arrival of a parcel
of books he would rapidly run through each volume, and



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ROBERT SOUTHEY. 395

mark all the passages he would ever be likely to want.
The book was then allotted its destined place, and his
memory was so retentive, that he was never afterwards at a
loss where to look for any particular information he might
require.

The scene of his labour was likewise that of his happi-
ness and of his highest honour. He had a thoroughly
English appreciation of home. There centred all his
temporal ambition. As a member of the social common-
wealth, his exalted dignity is the glory of modern litera-
ture. He was generous to a fault. His services were
always at the requisition of the needy. Strangers appUed,
and were suHS gf relief. Relatives were unfortunate, his
purse was always open. Coleridge, incomprehensibly
callous to the most powerful of human instincts, coldly
abandoned wife and children ; Southey was more to them
than a husband and a father. Let the character of the
man stand out in its deserved prominence, simple in his
tastes and open-hearted, to shame a luxurious and a selfish
age: enthusiastic in his calling, to kindle a like flame
in a generation, that, amid dissolving institutions and
opinions, seems destitute of any settled aim and conviction.
There is no need here to ask in behalf of genius an indul-
gent oblivion of vice and immorality. His most notorious
failings were venial, solely indicating his common union
with human imperfection. His career may be accused of
inconsistencies, his mental organization may betray some
glaring defects ; but he has left behind him a name that
will long stimulate by its ennobUng example, and a reputa-
tion of which his countrymen may be jusdy proud.



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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

Who is this musing Pflgrim of Poesy, wandering amid
the lakes and mountains of Cumberland ? For fifty years
his name has been a centre-point of controversy and
criticism in English literature. He has been in turns
satirized and eulogized, scorned and worshipped, feebly
imitated, and flippantly assailed* How little that can
excite us in the story of that calm career ! How much in
it to interest and instruct ! For this man stepped aside
from the stir and strife of the outer world to those
romantic solitudes with which his name will be for ever
associated. Here he worked out his self-adopted mission,
and toiled at his labour of love. To that long seclusion,
and that laborious self-teaching, we owe all that he has
left to us. To that steady self-reliance and cherished
unity of purpose are due every beauty and every fault of
that genius which has so much influenced the thought and
changed the taste of our generation.

William Wordsworth was the second son of John
Wordsworth, attorney. He was born at Cockermouthy in
Cumberland. His lineage, both on his father and mother's

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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 397

side, is good. The ancestry of the former settled in York-
shire before the Norman Conquest, and the latter was
descended from the Crackenthorpes, who, from the time
of Edward III. had been the proprietors of Newbiggen
Hall, in Westmoreland. William's childhood was spent
partly at Cockermouth, and partly with his mother's family
at Penrith. Of his early days he has left some brief
account, and made especial mention of his mother, who
died of a decline when he was at the age of fourteen, and
had just returned from school, at Hawkeshead. He tells
us : "I remember my mother only in some few situations,
one of which was her pinning a nosegay to my breast,
when I was going to say the Catechism in the church, as
was customary before Easter. I remember also telling
her on one week-day that I had been at church, for our
school stood in the qjiurchyard, and we had frequent
opportunities of seeing what was going on there. The
occasion was a woman doing penance in the church in a
white sheet. My mother commended my having been
present, expressing a hope that I should remember the cir-
cumstance for the rest of my life. ' But,' said I, * mamma,
they did not give me a penny, as I had been told they
would.' * Oh !' said she, recanting her praises, ' if that
was your motive, you were very prop^ly disappointed.* "

It is strange that she once said to a fnend that William
was the only one of her five children about whom she felt
any anxiety ; and that she had a strong presentiment that
he would be remarkable eithar for good or evil. Her
fears were occasioned by the child's strange and impetuous
temp^. He tells us that while staying at the house of
his ^rmdfather, at Penrith, he retired to the attic to
commit suicide, because he fancied that he had suffered
some indignity. '*"! took the foil in hand," he says, "but
my heart failed."

The days of his boyhood he always looked back upon as



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398 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

very happy. He was allowed at school and in vacations to
read what books he liked, and revelled in the works of
Fielding and Swift ; while " Don Quixote " and " Gil Bias''
were choice favourites. Much as he enjoyed these writings,
their influence on his mind is not easily to be traced ; and
he doubtless gained far more inspiration from the extracts
from Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, which, at a tender
age, his father made him commit to memory.

" Perlegendi sunt Poetse," is one of the directions laid
down by Cicero, for the education of the Orator. For
that of the Poet, it seems even more important. An
accurate knowledge of some plays of Shakespeare, and a
few books of " Paradise Lost," would be as useful in
English education, as the daily repetition of Horace and
Virgil, and our schools seem at last awakening to this truth.

William Wordsworth was sent to Hawkeshead, in Lan-
cashire, a school founded by Sandys, Archbishop of York,
in 1585. There were four head masters in succession
while he was there. To one of these, the Rev. William
Taylor, he was especially attached. In the ** Prelude " he
records his feelings on visiting the grave of his honoured
teacher, and also his remembrance of the death-bed scene,
to which he and some of the other pupils were invited to
receive the last words of the dying man.

It was while at this school that the future Laureate first
wooed the Muse whose invoked inspiration was hereafter to
be to him its own exceeding great reward. " The Summer
Vacation,'' a subject imposed by his master, was his first
poem ; and at the age of fifteen he, among other boys,
was invited to write lines in celebration of the second
centenary from the foundation of the school. It is said
that the verses he produced were much admired. Their
merit is far above the average of school prize poems ; and
their marked dissimilarity to the poetical productions of
his maturer years is very striking.



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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 399

In October, 1787, at the age of eighteen, he was sent to
Cambridge, and commenced residence at St. John's College.
By the University system he seems to have profited little,
and he speaks of it with little respect. The daily routine
of chapels and lectures, with their regular machinery, and
sometimes heartless formality, seems to have affected him