CHAPTER III.

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