To-day I will write about Robert Southey, and, as he and Coleridge
married sisters, you may claim a distant relationship with him. His
personal character was beautiful and unselfish, and his dwelling at
Keswick was the home that for years sheltered Coleridge's children.
With hardly an exception the poets of England have had an easy and
royal mastery of prose; and in the case of Robert Southey there are
some, and they are not the worst critics, who anticipate that his prose
will long outlast his poetry in the Temple of Fame.
We may suppose that to a man whose whole private life was stainlessly
dedicated to a noble rectitude of conduct, and whose every act was
sternly subjected to the judgment of an unbending conscience, some
circumstances of the private life of Nelson must have been distasteful
and open to censure; but no such reservations dimmed the splendour
of Southey's tribute to the public hero who gave his life in the act of
establishing, beyond reach of dispute or cavil, the throne of England as
Queen of the Sea.
"The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a
public calamity; men started at the intelligence, and turned pale,
as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. An object of
our admiration and affection, of our pride and of our hopes, was
suddenly taken from us, and it seemed as if we had never, till
then, known how deeply we loved and reverenced him.
"What the country had lost in its great naval hero--the greatest
of our own, and of all former times, was scarcely taken into the
account of grief. So perfectly, indeed, had he performed his part,
that the maritime war, after the battle of Trafalgar, was
considered at an end; the fleets of the enemy were not merely
defeated, but destroyed; new navies must be built, and a new race
of seamen reared for them, before the possibility of their
invading our shores could again be contemplated.
"It was not, therefore, from any selfish reflection upon the
magnitude of our loss that we mourned for him; the general sorrow
was of a higher character. The people of England grieved that
funeral ceremonies, public monuments and posthumous rewards, were
all which they could now bestow upon him whom the king, the
legislature, and the nation, would alike have delighted to honour;
whom every tongue would have blessed; whose presence in every
village through which he might have passed would have wakened the
church bells, have given schoolboys a holiday, have drawn children
from their sports to gaze upon him, and 'old men from the chimney
corner' to look upon Nelson ere they died.
"The victory of Trafalgar was celebrated, indeed, with the usual
forms of rejoicing, but they were without joy; for such already
was the glory of the British Navy through Nelson's surpassing
genius, that it scarcely seemed to receive any addition from the
most signal victory that ever was achieved upon the sea; and the
destruction of this mighty fleet, by which all the maritime
schemes of France were totally frustrated, hardly appeared to add
to our security or strength, for while Nelson was living to watch
the combined squadrons of the enemy, we felt ourselves as secure
as now, when they were no longer in existence.
"There was reason to suppose from the appearances upon opening the
body, that in the course of nature he might have attained, like
his father, to a good old age. Yet he cannot be said to have
fallen prematurely whose work was done; nor ought he to be
lamented, who died so full of honours, and at the height of human
fame. The most triumphant death is that of a martyr; the most
awful, that of the martyred patriot; the most splendid, that of
the hero in the hour of victory; and if the chariot and the horses
of fire had been vouchsafed for Nelson's translation, he could
scarcely have departed in a brighter blaze of glory.
"He has left us, not indeed his mantle of inspiration, but a name
and an example which are at this hour inspiring hundreds of the
youth of England; a name which is our pride, and an example which
will continue to be our shield and our strength."
Nelson left England the Queen of the Sea, and the great war with
Germany has failed to displace her from that splendid throne. For the
plain fact of history remains that, after the battle of Jutland, the
German High Seas Fleet never ventured out of port again till the end of
the war; and when it did emerge from its ignominious security, it sailed
to captivity at Scapa Flow, there ultimately to repose on the bottom of
the sea.
Your loving old
G.P.
19