WANDERINGS, 1795-1803.
Through pastoral Somerset, through Devon amid falling leaves, then
over rough Cornish roads, the coach brought Southey—cold, hungry, and
dispirited—to Falmouth. No packet there for Corunna; no packet starting
before December 1st. The gap of time looked colourless and dreary, nor
could even the philosophy of Epictetus lift him quite above “the things
independent of the will.” After a comfortless and stormy voyage, on the
fifth morning the sun shone, and through a mist the barren cliffs of
Galicia, with breakers tumbling at their feet, rose in sight. Who has
not experienced, when first he has touched a foreign soil, how nature
purges the visual nerve with lucky euphrasy? The shadowy streets, the
latticed houses, the fountains, the fragments of Moorish architecture,
the Jewish faces of the men, the lustrous eyes of girls, the children
gaily bedizened, the old witch-like women with brown shrivelled parchment
for skin, told Southey that he was far from home. Nor at night was he
permitted to forget his whereabouts; out of doors cats were uttering soft
things in most vile Spanish; beneath his blanket, familiars, bloodthirsty
as those of the Inquisition, made him their own. He was not sorry when
the crazy coach, drawn by six mules, received him and his uncle, and the
journey eastward began to the shout of the muleteers and the clink of a
hundred bells.
Some eighteen days were spent upon the road to Madrid. Had Southey not
left half his life behind him in Bristol, those December days would
have been almost wholly pleasurable. As it was, they yielded a large
possession for the inner eye, and gave his heart a hold upon this new
land which, in a certain sense, became for ever after the land of
his adoption. It was pleasant when, having gone forward on foot, he
reached the crest of some mountain road, to look down on broken waters
in the glen, and across to the little white-walled convent amid its
chestnuts, and back to the dim ocean; there, on the summit, to rest with
the odour of furze blossoms and the tinkle of goats in the air, and,
while the mules wound up the long ascent, to turn all this into hasty
rhymes, ending with the thought of peace, and love, and Edith. Then the
bells audibly approaching, and the loud-voiced muleteer consigning his
struggling team to Saint Michael and three hundred devils; and then on to
remoter hills, or moor and swamp, or the bridge flung across a ravine,
or the path above a precipice, with mist and moonlight below. And next
day some walled city, with its decaying towers and dim piazza; some
church, with its balcony of ghastly skulls; some abandoned castle, or
jasper-pillared Moorish gateway and gallery. Nor were the little inns and
baiting-houses without compensations for their manifold discomforts. The
Spanish country-folk were dirty and ignorant, but they had a courtesy
unknown to English peasants; Southey would join the group around the
kitchen fire, and be, as far as his imperfect speech allowed, one with
the rustics, the carriers, the hostess, the children, the village barber,
the familiar priest, and the familiar pigs. When chambermaid Josepha
took hold of his hair and gravely advised him never to tie it or to
wear powder, she meant simple friendliness, no more. In his recoil from
the dream of human perfectibility, Southey allowed himself at times to
square accounts with common-sense by a cynical outbreak; but, in truth,
he was a warm-hearted lover of his kind. Even feudalism and Catholicism
had not utterly degraded the Spaniard. Southey thanks God that the pride
of chivalry is extinguished; his Protestant zeal becomes deep-dyed in
presence of our Lady of Seven Sorrows and the Holy Napkin. “Here, in
the words of Mary Wollstonecraft,” he writes, “‘the serious folly of
Superstition stares every man of sense in the face.’” Yet Spain has
inherited tender and glorious memories; by the river Ezla he recalls
Montemayor’s wooing of his Diana; at Tordesillas he muses on the spot
where Queen Joanna watched by her husband’s corpse, and where Padilla,
Martyr of Freedom, triumphed and endured. At length the travellers,
accompanied by Manuel, the most vivacious and accomplished of barbers,
drew near Madrid, passed the miles of kneeling washerwomen and outspread
clothes on the river banks, entered the city, put up at the Cruz de
Malta, and were not ill-content to procure once more a well-cooked supper
and a clean bed.
Southey pursued with ardour his study of the Spanish language, and could
soon talk learnedly of its great writers. The national theatres, and
the sorry spectacle of bullock-teasing, made a slighter impression upon
him than did the cloisters of the new Franciscan Convent. He had been
meditating his design of a series of poems to illustrate the mythologies
of the world; here the whole portentous history of St. Francis was
displayed upon the walls. “Do they believe all this, sir?” he asked Mr.
Hill. “Yes, and a great deal more of the same kind,” was the reply. “My
first thought was ... here is a mythology not less wild and fanciful
than any of those upon which my imagination was employed, and one which
ought to be included in my ambitious design.” Thus Southey’s attention
was drawn for the first time to the legendary and monastic history of the
Church.
His Majesty of Spain, with his courtesans and his courtiers, possibly
also with the Queen and her gallants, had gone westward to meet the
Portuguese court upon the borders. As a matter of course, therefore,
no traveller could hope to leave Madrid, every carriage, cart, horse,
mule, and ass being embargoed for the royal service. The followers of
the father of his people numbered seven thousand, and they advanced,
devouring all before them, neither paying nor promising to pay, leaving a
broad track behind as bare as that stripped by an army of locusts, with
here a weeping cottager, and there a smoking cork-tree, for a memorial of
their march. Ten days after the king’s departure, Mr. Hill and his nephew
succeeded in finding a buggy with two mules, and made their escape,
taking with them their own larder. Their destination was Lisbon, and
as they drew towards the royal party, the risk of embargo added a zest
to travel hardly less piquant than that imparted by the neighbourhood
of bandits. It was mid-January; the mountains shone with snow; but
olive-gathering had begun in the plains; violets were in blossom, and in
the air was a genial warmth. As they drove south and west, the younger
traveller noted for his diary the first appearance of orange-trees, the
first myrtle, the first fence of aloes. A pressure was on their spirits
till Lisbon should be reached; they would not linger to watch the sad
procession attending a body uncovered upon its bier; they left behind
the pilgrims to our Lady’s Shrine, pious bacchanals half naked and half
drunk, advancing to the tune of bagpipe and drum; then the gleam of
waters before them, a rough two hours’ passage, and the weary heads were
on their pillows, to be roused before morning by an earthquake, with its
sudden trembling and cracking.
Life at Lisbon was not altogether after Southey’s heart. His uncle’s
books and manuscripts were indeed a treasure to explore, but Mr. Hill
lived in society as well as in his study, and thought it right to give
his nephew the advantage of new acquaintances. What had the author of
_Joan of Arc_, the husband of Edith Southey, the disciple of Rousseau, of
Godwin, the Stoic, the tall, dark-eyed young man with a certain wildness
of expression in his face, standing alone or discoursing earnestly on
Industrial Communities of Women—what had he to do with the _inania
regna_ of the drawing-room? He cared not for cards nor for dancing; he
possessed no gift for turning the leaves on the harpsichord, and saying
the happy word at the right moment. Southey, indeed, knew as little as
possible of music; and all through his life acted on the principle that
the worthiest use of sound without sense had been long ago discovered
by schoolboys let loose from their tasks; he loved to create a chaos of
sheer noise after those hours during which silence had been interrupted
only by the scraping of his pen. For the rest, the sallies of glee from a
mountain brook, the piping of a thrush from the orchard-bough, would have
delighted him more than all the trills of Sontag or the finest rapture
of Malibran. It was with some of the superiority and seriousness of a
philosopher just out of his teens that he unbent to the frivolities of
the Lisbon drawing-rooms.
But if Lisbon had its vexations, the country, the climate, the mountains
with their streams and coolness, the odorous gardens, Tagus flashing
in the sunlight, the rough bar glittering with white breakers, and the
Atlantic, made amends. When April came, Mr. Hill moved to his house at
Cintra, and the memories and sensations “felt in the blood and felt
along the heart,” which Southey brought with him to England, were
especially associated with this delightful retreat. “Never was a house
more completely secluded than my uncle’s: it is so surrounded with
lemon-trees and laurels as nowhere to be visible at the distance of ten
yards.... A little stream of water runs down the hill before the door,
another door opens into a lemon-garden, and from the sitting-room we have
just such a prospect over lemon-trees and laurels to an opposite hill
as, by promising a better, invites us to walk.... On one of the mountain
eminences stands the Penha Convent, visible from the hills near Lisbon.
On another are the ruins of a Moorish castle, and a cistern, within its
boundaries, kept always full by a spring of purest water that rises in
it. From this elevation the eye stretches over a bare and melancholy
country to Lisbon on the one side, and on the other to the distant
Convent of Mafra, the Atlantic bounding the greater part of the prospect.
I never beheld a view that so effectually checked the wish of wandering.”
“Lisbon, from which God grant me a speedy deliverance,” is the heading of
one of Southey’s letters; but when the day came to look on Lisbon perhaps
for the last time, his heart grew heavy with happy recollection. It was
with no regretful feeling, however, that he leaped ashore, glad, after
all, to exchange the sparkling Tagus and the lemon groves of Portugal for
the mud-encumbered tide of Avon and a glimpse of British smoke. “I intend
to write a hymn,” he says, “to the Dii Penates.” His joy in reunion
with his wife was made more rare and tender by finding her in sorrow;
the grief was also peculiarly his own—Lovell was dead. He had been taken
ill at Salisbury, and by his haste to reach his fireside had heightened
the fever which hung upon him. Coleridge, writing to his friend Poole
at this time, expresses himself with amiable but inactive piety: “The
widow is calm, and amused with her beautiful infant. We are all become
more religious than we were. God be ever praised for all things.” Southey
also writes characteristically: “Poor Lovell! I am in hopes of raising
something for his widow by publishing his best pieces, if only enough
to buy her a harpsichord.... Will you procure me some subscribers?” No
idle conceit of serving her; for Mrs. Lovell with her child, as well
as Mrs. Coleridge with her children, at a later time became members of
the Southey household. Already—though Coleridge might resent it—Southey
was willing to part with some vague enthusiasms which wandered in the
inane of a young man’s fancy, for the sake of simple loyalties and manly
tendernesses. No one was more boyish-hearted than Southey at fifty; but
even at twenty-two it would not have been surprising to find grey hairs
sprinkling the dark. “How does time mellow down our opinions! Little
of that ardent enthusiasm which so lately fevered my whole character
remains. I have contracted my sphere of action within the little circle
of my own friends, and even my wishes seldom stray beyond it.... I want
a little room to arrange my books in, and some Lares of my own.” This
domestic feeling was not a besotted contentment in narrow interests; no
man was more deeply moved by the political changes in his own country,
by the national uprising in the Spanish peninsula, than Southey. While
seated at his desk, his intellect ranged through dim centuries of the
past. But his heart needed an abiding-place, and he yielded to the
bonds—strict and dear—of duty and of love which bound his own life to the
lives of others.
The ambitious quarto on which Cottle prided himself not a little was now
published (1796). To assign its true place to _Joan of Arc_, we must
remember that narrative poetry in the eighteenth century was of the
slenderest dimensions and the most modest temper. Poems of description
and sentiment seemed to leave no place for poems of action and passion.
Delicately finished cabinet pictures, like Shenstone’s _Schoolmistress_
and Goldsmith’s _Deserted Village_, had superseded fresco. The only
great English epic of that century is the prose Odyssey of which Mr.
Tom Jones is the hero. That estimable London merchant, Glover, had
indeed written an heroic poem containing the correct number of Books;
its subject was a lofty one; the sentiments were generous, the language
dignified; and inasmuch as Leonidas was a patriot and a Whig, true Whigs
and patriots bought and praised the poem. But Glover’s poetry lacks the
informing breath of life. His second poem, _The Athenaid_, appeared
after his death, and its thirty books fell plumb into the water of
oblivion. It looked as if the narrative poem _à longue haleine_ was dead
in English literature. Cowper had given breadth, with a mingled gaiety
and gravity, to the poetry of description and sentiment; Burns had made
the air tremulous with snatches of pure and thrilling song; the _Lyrical
Ballads_ were not yet. At this moment, from a provincial press, _Joan
of Arc_ was issued. As a piece of romantic narrative it belongs to the
new age of poetry; in sentiment it is revolutionary and republican; its
garment of style is of the eighteenth century. Nowhere, except it be in
the verses which hail “Inoculation, lovely Maid!” does the personified
abstraction, galvanized into life by printer’s type and poet’s epithet,
stalk more at large than in the unfortunate ninth book, the Vision of the
Maid, which William Taylor, of Norwich, pronounced worthy of Dante. The
critical reviews of the time were liberal in politics, and the poem was
praised and bought. “Brissot murdered” was good, and “the blameless wife
of Roland” atoned for some offences against taste; there was also that
notable reference to the “Almighty people” who “from their tyrant’s hand
dashed down the iron rod.” The delegated maid is a creature overflowing
with Rousseauish sensibility; virtue, innocence, the peaceful cot,
stand over against the wars and tyranny of kings, and the superstition
and cruelty of prelates. Southey himself soon disrelished the youthful
heats and violences of the poem; he valued it as the work which first
lifted him into public view; and, partly out of a kind of gratitude, he
rehandled the _Joan_ again and again. It would furnish an instructive
lesson to a young writer to note how its asperities were softened, its
spasm subdued, its swelling words abated. Yet its chief interest will
be perceived only by readers of the earlier text. To the second book
Coleridge contributed some four hundred lines, where Platonic philosophy
and protests against the Newtonian hypothesis of æther are not very
appropriately brought into connexion with the shepherd-girl of Domremi.
These lines disappeared from all editions after the first.[3]
The neighbourhood of Bristol was for the present Southey’s home. The
quickening of his blood by the beauty, the air and sun, of Southern
Europe, the sense of power imparted by his achievement in poetry, the
joy of reunion with his young wife, the joy, also, of solitude among
rocks and woods, combined to throw him into a vivid and creative mood.
His head was full of designs for tragedies, epics, novels, romances,
tales—among the rest, “My Oriental poem of The Destruction of the Dom
Daniel.” He has a “Helicon kind of dropsy” upon him; he had rather leave
off eating than poetizing. He was also engaged in making the promised
book of travel for Cottle; in what leisure time remained after these
employments he scribbled for _The Monthly Magazine_, and to good purpose,
for in eight months he had earned no less than “seven pounds and two pair
of breeches,” which, as he observes to his brother Tom, “is not amiss.”
He was resolved to be happy, and he was happy. Now, too, the foolish
estrangement on Coleridge’s part was brought to an end. Southey had
been making some acquaintance with German literature at second hand. He
had read Taylor’s rendering of Bürger’s _Lenore_, and wondered who this
William Taylor was; he had read Schiller’s _Cabal and Love_ in a wretched
translation, finding the fifth act dreadfully affecting; he had also read
Schiller’s _Fiesco_. Coleridge was just back after a visit to Birmingham,
but still held off from his brother-in-law and former friend. A sentence
from Schiller, copied on a slip of paper by Southey, with a word or
two of conciliation, was sent to the offended Abdiel of Pantisocracy:
“Fiesco! Fiesco! thou leavest a void in my bosom, which the human race,
thrice told, will never fill up.” It did not take much to melt the faint
resentment of Coleridge, and to open his liberal heart. An interview
followed, and in an hour’s time, as the story is told by Coleridge’s
nephew, “these two extraordinary youths were arm in arm again.”
Seven pounds and two pair of breeches are not amiss but pounds take
to themselves wings, and fly away: a poet’s wealth is commonly in the
_paulo-post-futurum_ tense; it therefore behoved Southey to proceed with
his intended study of the law. By Christmas he would receive the first
instalment of an annual allowance of 160_l._ promised by his generous
friend Wynn upon coming of age; but Southey, who had just written his
_Hymn to the Penates_—a poem of grave tenderness and sober beauty—knew
that those deities are exact in their demand for the dues of fire and
salt, for the firstlings of fruits, and for offerings of fine flour. A
hundred and sixty pounds would not appease them. To London, therefore,
he must go, and Blackstone must become his counsellor. But never did
Sindbad suffer from the tyrannous old man between his shoulders as Robert
Southey suffered from Blackstone. London in itself meant deprivation
of all that he most cared for; he loved to shape his life in large and
simple lines, and London seemed to scribble over his consciousness with
distractions and intricacies. “My spirits always sink when I approach it.
Green fields are my delight. I am not only better in health, but even in
heart, in the country.” Some of his father’s love of rural sights and
sounds was in him, though hare-hunting was not an amusement of Southey
the younger; he was as little of a sportsman as his friend Sir Thomas
More: the only murderous sport, indeed, which Southey ever engaged in
was that of pistol-shooting, with sand for ammunition, at the wasps in
Bedford’s garden, when he needed a diversion from the wars of Talbot and
the “missioned Maid.” Two pleasures of a rare kind London offered—the
presence of old friends, and the pursuit of old books upon the stalls.
But not even for these best lures proposed by the Demon of the place
would Southey renounce
“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 and _Madoc_ seemed 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, reading law 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 stout heart 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 the
_belles-lettres_ and 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 followed by 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 whose _Speaker_ our 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 divorced
bridegroom, 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 of _Thalaba_ and _Kehama_ was 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 to the craft and mystery of such verse-making in the
_Morning Post_, earning thereby a guinea a week, but it was not until
_Bishop Bruno_ was 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 his _Mary 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 with
_Rudiger_ and _Lord 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 in _Lord William_ shone 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. In _Roderick_ and
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 of keen-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) _Madoc_ was steadily advancing, and _The Destruction
of the Dom Daniel_ had 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 who
love 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 and comfort 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 finished
_Madoc_, 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 as _Thalaba_. A _Mohammed_, 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 the _Mohammed_ was 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 dropped from 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 way from 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,” called _Gebir_,
“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 their current 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 his _Thalaba_. “I am not quite 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-footed _burros_, 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 assailed folio 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 of _Thalaba_ were in his trunk in manuscript when he sailed from
Falmouth; the remaining six were of a southern birth. “I am busy,” he
says, “in correcting _Thalaba_ for the press.... It is a good job done,
and so I have thought of another, and another, and another.” As with
_Joan 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. By _Joan_ and the miscellaneous _Poems_
of 1797, Southey had gained not far from a hundred and fifty pounds; he
might fairly expect a hundred guineas for _Thalaba_. 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 is _Thalaba_
ready, for which I ask this sum.” “_Thalaba_ finished, 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; already _The Curse of Kehama_ is 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 as _Thalaba_; and a nearer one of a Persian 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. “I _did_ long,”
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 long planned 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 your _Friday_,” 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 place in 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 1000_l._ 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 noble _abandon_ of 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 his soul. “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 conceive the 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 his _Madoc_. 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 and
research—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 false _numbers_ in 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 of _Amadis of Gaul_, for which Longman and Rees promised
him a munificent sixty pounds. He toiled at his _History 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 and a 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 the _History 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 of this 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.