Chapter VI: Changes and Events, 1803-1843 (1)

In October, 1805, Southey started with his friend Elmsley for a short tour in Scotland. On their way northward they stopped three days at Ashestiel. There, in a small house, rising amid its old-fashioned garden, with pastoral hills all around, and the Tweed winding at the meadow’s end, lived Walter Scott. It was the year in which old Border song had waked up, with ampler echoings, in the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, and Scott was already famous. Earlier in the year he had visited Grasmere, and had stood upon the summit of Helvellyn, with Wordsworth and Davy by his side. The three October days, with their still, misty brightness, went by in full enjoyment. Southey had brought with him a manuscript containing sundry metrical romances of the fifteenth century, on which his host pored, as far as courtesy and the hours allowed, with much delight; and the guests saw Melrose, that old romance in stone so dear to Scott, went salmon-spearing on the Tweed, dined on a hare snapped up before their eyes by Percy and Douglas, and visited Yarrow. From Ashestiel they proceeded to Edinburgh. Southey looked coldly on the grey metropolis; its new city seemed a kind of Puritan Bath, which worshipped propriety instead of pleasure; but the old town, seen amid the slant light of a wild red sunset, impressed him much, its vast irregular outline of roofs and chimneys rising against tumultuous clouds like the dismantled fragments of a giant’s palace. Southey was prepared to find himself and his friends of the Lakes persons of higher stature than the Scotch _literatuli_. Before accepting an invitation to meet him at supper, Jeffrey politely forwarded the proof of an unpublished review of _Madoc_; if the poet preferred that his reviewer should not present himself, Mr. Jeffrey would deny himself the pleasure of Mr. Southey’s acquaintance. Southey was not to be daunted, and, as he tells it himself, felt nothing but good-humour on beholding a bright-faced homunculus of five-foot-one, the centre of an attentive circle, ëënunciating with North-British ëëlocution his doctrines on taste. The lively little gentleman, who thought to crush _The Excursion_—he could as easily crush Skiddaw, said Southey—received from the author of _Madoc_ a courtesy _de haut en bas_ intended to bring home to his consciousness the fact that he was—but five-foot-one. The bland lips of the gods who looked down on Auld Reekie that evening smiled at the magnanimity alike of poet and critic.

Two years later (1807), differences having arisen between the proprietors and the editor of the _Edinburgh Review_, it was in contemplation to alter the management, and Longman wrote requesting Southey to review him two or three articles “in his best manner.” Southey did not keep firkins of criticism of first and second brand, but he was not unwilling to receive ten guineas a sheet instead of seven pounds. When, however, six months later, Scott urged his friend to contribute, Judge Jeffrey still sat on the bench of the _Edinburgh Review_, hanging, drawing, and quartering luckless poets with undiminished vivacity. It was of no use for Scott to assure Southey that the homunculus, notwithstanding his flippant attacks on _Madoc_ and _Thalaba_, had the most sincere respect for their author and his talents. Setting all personal feelings aside, an irreconcilable difference, Southey declared, between Jeffrey and himself upon every great principle of taste, morality, and policy, occasioned a difficulty which could not be removed. Within less than twelve months Scott, alienated by the deepening Whiggery of the _Review_, and by more personal causes, had ceased to contribute, and opposite his name in the list of subscribers Constable had written, with indignant notes of exclamation, “_Stopt!!!_” John Murray, the young bookseller in Fleet Street, had been to Ashestiel; in “dern privacie” a bold complot was laid; why should the Edinburgh clique carry it before them? The spirit of England was still sound, and would respond to loyalty, patriotism, the good traditions of Church and State, the temper of gentlemen, courage, scholarship; Gifford, of the Anti-Jacobin, had surely a sturdier arm than Jeffrey; George Ellis would remember his swashing-blow; there were the Roses, and Matthias, and Heber; a rival _Review_ should see the light, and that speedily; “a good plot, good friends, and full of expectation—an excellent plot, very good friends.”

Southey was invited to write on Spanish affairs for the first number of the _Quarterly_ (February, 1809). His political opinions had undergone a considerable alteration since the days of Pantisocracy and _Joan of Arc_. The Reign of Terror had not caused a violent reaction against the doctrine of a Republic, nor did he soon cease to sympathize with France. But his hopes were dashed; it was plain that “the millennium would not come this bout.” Man as he is appeared more greedy, ignorant, and dangerous than he had appeared before, though man as he may be was still a being composed of knowledge, virtue, and love. The ideal republic receded into the dimness of unborn time; no doubt—so Southey maintained to the end—a republic is the best form of government in itself, as a sundial is simpler and surer than a time-piece; but the sun of reason does not always shine, and therefore complicated systems of government, containing checks and counter-checks, are needful in old countries for the present; better systems are no doubt conceivable—for better men. “Mr. Southey’s mind,” wrote Hazlitt, “is essentially sanguine, even to overweeningness. It is prophetic of good; it cordially embraces it; it casts a longing, lingering look after it, even when it is gone for ever. He cannot bear to give up the thought of happiness, his confidence in his fellow-men, when all else despair. It is the very element where he must live or have no life at all.’” This is true; we sacrifice too much to prudence—Southey said, when not far from sixty—and in fear of incurring the danger or the reproach of enthusiasm, too often we stifle the holiest impulses of the understanding and the heart. Still, at sixty he believed in a state of society actually to be realized as superior to English society in the nineteenth century, as that itself is superior to the condition of the tattooed Britons, or of the Northern Pirates from whom we have descended. But the error of supposing such a state of society too near, of fancying that there is a short road to it, seemed to him a pernicious error, seducing the young and generous into an alliance with whatever is flagitious and detestable.

It was not until the Peace of Amiens (1802) that Southey was restored in feeling to his own country. From that hour the new departure in his politics may be said to date. The honour of England became as dear to him as to her most patriotic son; and in the man who had subjugated the Swiss Republic, and thrown into a dungeon the champion of Negro independence, and slaughtered his prisoners at Jaffa, he indignantly refused to recognize the representative of the generous principles of 1789. To him, as to Wordsworth, the very life of virtue in mankind seemed to dwell in the struggle against the military despotism which threatened to overwhelm the whole civilized world. Whatever went along with a spirited war-policy Southey could accept. It appeared to himself that his views and hopes had changed precisely because the heart and soul of his wishes had continued the same. To remove the obstacles which retard the improvement of mankind was the one object to which, first and last, he gave his most earnest vows. “This has been the pole-star of my course; the needle has shifted according to the movements of the state vessel wherein I am embarked, but the direction to which it points has always been the same. I did not fall into the error of those who, having been the friends of France when they imagined that the cause of liberty was implicated in her success, transferred their attachment from the Republic to the Military Tyranny in which it ended, and regarded with complacency the progress of oppression because France was the oppressor. ‘They had turned their face toward the East in the morning to worship the rising sun, and in the evening they were looking eastward, obstinately affirming that still the sun was there.’ I, on the contrary altered my position as the world went round.”[9]

Wordsworth has described in memorable words the sudden exaltation of the spirit of resistance to Napoleon, its change from the temper of fortitude to enthusiasm, animated by hope, when the Spanish people rose against their oppressors. “From that moment,” he says, “this corruptible put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality.” Southey had learned to love the people of the Peninsula; he had almost naturalized himself among them by his studies of Spanish and Portuguese history and literature. Now there was in him a new birth of passion at a period of life when ordinarily the crust of custom begins to encase our free spirits. All his moral ardour flowed in the same current with his political enthusiasm; in this war there was as direct a contest between the principles of evil and good as the elder Persians or the Manicheans imagined in their fables. “Since the stirring day of the French Revolution,” he writes to John May, “I have never felt half so much excitement in political events as the present state of Spain has given me.” Little as he liked to leave home, if the Spaniards would bury their crown and sceptre, he would gird up his loins and assist at the ceremony, devout as ever pilgrim at Compostella. A federal republic which should unite the Peninsula, and allow the internal governments to remain distinct, was what Southey ardently desired. When news came of the Convention of Cintra (1808), the poet, ordinarily so punctual a sleeper, lay awake all night; since the execution of the Brissotines no public event distressed him so deeply. “How gravely and earnestly used Samuel Taylor Coleridge”—so writes Coleridge’s daughter—“and William Wordsworth and my uncle Southey also, to discuss the affairs of the nation, as if it all came home to their business and bosoms, as if it were their private concern! Men do not canvass these matters now-a-days, I think, quite in the same tone.”

That faith in the ultimate triumph of good which sustains Southey’s heroine against the persecution of the Almighty Rajah, sustained Southey himself during the long struggle with Napoleon. A military despotism youthful and full of vigour, he said, must beat down corrupt establishments and worn-out governments; but how can it beat down for ever a true love of liberty and a true spirit of patriotism? When at last tidings reached Keswick that the Allies were in Paris, Southey’s feelings were such as he had never experienced before. “The curtain had fallen after a tragedy of five-and-twenty years.” The hopes, and the ardours, and the errors, and the struggles of his early life crowded upon his mind; all things seemed to have worked together for good. He rejoiced that the whirlwind of revolution had cleared away the pestilence of the old governments; he rejoiced that right had conquered might. He did not wish to see the bad Bourbon race restored, except to complete Bonaparte’s overthrow. And he feared lest an evil peace should be made. Paris taken, a commanding intellect might have cast Europe into whatever mould it pleased. “The first business,” says Southey, with remarkable prevision, “should have been to have reduced France to what she was before Louis XIV.’s time; the second, to have created a great power in the North of Germany, with Prussia at its head; the third, to have consolidated Italy into one kingdom or commonwealth.”

The politicians of the _Edinburgh Review_ had predicted ruin for all who dared to oppose the Corsican; they ridiculed the romantic hopes of the English nation; the fate of Spain, they declared in 1810, was decided; it would be cruel, they said, to foment petty insurrections; France had conquered Europe. It was this policy of despair which roused Scott and Southey. “We shall hoist the bloody flag,” writes the latter, “down alongside that Scotch ship, and engage her yard-arm to yard-arm.” But at first Southey, by his own request, was put upon other work than that of firing off the heavy _Quarterly_ guns. Probably no man in England had read so many books of travel; these he could review better, he believed, than anything else; biography and history were also within his reach; with English poetry, from Spenser onwards, his acquaintance was wide and minute, but he took no pleasure in sitting in judgment on his contemporaries; his knowledge of the literary history of Spain and Portugal was a speciality, which, as often as the readers of the _Review_ could bear with it, might be brought into use. Two things he could promise without fail—perfect sincerity in what he might write, without the slightest pretension of knowledge which he did not possess, and a punctuality not to be exceeded by Mr. Murray’s opposite neighbour, the clock of St. Dunstan’s.

Southey’s essays—literary, biographical, historical, and miscellaneous—would probably now exist in a collected form, and constitute a store-house of information—information often obtained with difficulty, and always conveyed in a lucid and happy style—were it not that he chose, on the eve of the Reform Bill, to earn whatever unpopularity he could by collecting his essays on political and social subjects. Affairs had hurried forward with eager strides; these _Quarterly_ articles seemed already far behind, and might safely be left to take a quiet corner in Time’s wallet among the alms for oblivion. Yet Southey’s political articles had been effective in their day, and have still a value by no means wholly antiquarian. His home politics had been, in the main, determined by his convictions on the great European questions. There was a party of revolution in this country eager to break with the past, ready to venture every experiment for a future of mere surmise. Southey believed that the moral sense of the English people, their regard for conduct, would do much to preserve them from lawless excess; still, the lesson read by recent history was that order once overthrown, anarchy follows, to be itself quelled by the lordship of the sword. Rights, however, were pleaded—shall we refuse to any man the rights of a man? “Therapeutics,” says Southey, “were in a miserable state as long as practitioners proceeded upon the gratuitous theory of elementary complexions; ... natural philosophy was no better, being a mere farrago of romance, founded upon idle tales or fanciful conjectures, not upon observation and experiment. The science of politics is just now in the same stage; it has been erected by shallow sophists upon abstract rights and imaginary compacts, without the slightest reference to habits and history.” “Order and improvement” were the words inscribed on Southey’s banner. Order, that England might not fall, as France had fallen, into the hands of a military saviour of society; order, that she might be in a condition to wage her great feud on behalf of freedom with undivided energy. Order, therefore, first; not by repression alone—though there were a time and a place for repression also—but order with improvement as a portion of its very life and being. Southey was a poet and a moralist, and judged of the well-being of a people by other than material standards; the wealth of nations seemed to him something other and higher than can be ascertained by wages and prices, rent and revenue, exports and imports. “True it is,” he writes, “the ground is more highly cultivated, the crooked hedge-rows have been thrown down, the fields are in better shape and of handsomer dimensions, the plough makes longer furrows, there is more corn and fewer weeds; but look at the noblest produce of the earth—look at the children of the soil, look at the seeds which are sown here for immortality!” “The system which produces the happiest moral effects will be found the most beneficial to the interest of the individual and the general weal; upon this basis the science of political economy will rest at last, when the ponderous volumes with which it has been overlaid shall have sunk by their own weight into the dead sea of oblivion.” Looking about him, he asked, What do the English people chiefly need? More wealth? It may be so; but rather wisdom to use the wealth they have. More votes? Yes, hereafter; but first the light of knowledge, that men may see how to use a vote. Even the visible beauty and grace of life seemed to Southey a precious thing, the loss of which might be set over against some gain in pounds, shillings, and pence. The bleak walls and barrack-like windows of a manufactory, the long, unlovely row of operatives’ dwellings, struck a chill into his heart. He contrasts the old cottages substantially built of native stone, mellowed by time, taken by nature to herself with a mother’s fondness, the rose-bushes beside the door, the little patch of flower-garden—he contrasts these with the bald deformities in which the hands of a great mill are stalled.

Before all else, national education appeared to Southey to be the need of England. He saw a great population growing up with eager appetites, and consciousness of augmented power. Whence were moral thoughtfulness and self-restraint to come? Not, surely, from the triumph of liberal opinions; not from the power to read every incentive to vice and sedition; nor from Religious Tract societies; nor from the portentous bibliolatry of the Evangelical party. But there is an education which at once enlightens the understanding and trains the conscience and the will. And there is that great association for making men good—the Church of England. Connect the two—education and the Church; the progress of enlightenment, virtue, and piety, however gradual, will be sure. Subordinate to this primary measure of reform, national education, many other measures were advocated by Southey. He looked forward to a time when, the great struggle respecting property over—for this struggle he saw looming not far off—public opinion will no more tolerate the extreme of poverty in a large class of the people than it now tolerates slavery in Europe; when the aggregation of land in the hands of great owners must cease, when that community of lands, which Owen of Lanark would too soon anticipate, might actually be realized. But these things were, perhaps, far off. Meanwhile how to bring nearer the golden age? Southey’s son has made out a long list of the measures urged upon the English people in the _Quarterly Review_, or elsewhere, by his father. Bearing in mind that the proposer of these measures resisted the Reform Bill, Free Trade, and Catholic Emancipation, any one curious in such things may determine with what political label he should be designated:—National education; the diffusion of cheap and good literature; a well-organized system of colonization, and especially of female emigration;[10] a wholesome training for the children of misery and vice in great cities; the establishment of Protestant sisters of charity, and a better order of hospital nurses; the establishment of savings-banks in all small towns; the abolition of flogging in the army and navy, except in extreme cases; improvements in the poor-laws; alterations in the game-laws; alterations in the criminal laws, as inflicting the punishment of death in far too many cases; execution of criminals within prison walls; alterations in the factory system for the benefit of the operative, and especially as to the employment of children; national works—reproductive if possible—to be undertaken in times of peculiar distress; the necessity of doing away with interments in crowded cities; the system of giving allotments of ground to labourers; the employment of paupers in cultivating waste lands; the commutation of tithes; and last, the need for more clergymen, more colleges, more courts of law.

“Mr. Southey,” said Hazlitt, “missed his way in Utopia; he has found it at old Sarum.” To one of Southey’s temper old Sarum seemed good, with its ordered freedom, its serious aspiration, its habitual pieties, its reasonable service, its reverent history, its beauty of holiness, its close where priests who are husbands and fathers live out their calm, benignant lives—its amiable home for those whose toil is ended, and who now sleep well. But how Southey found his way from his early deism to Anglican orthodoxy cannot be precisely determined. Certainly not for many years could he have made that subscription to the Articles of the Church of England, which at the first barred his way to taking orders. The superstition, which seemed to be the chief spiritual food of Spain, had left Southey, for the rest of his life, a resolute opponent of Catholicism; and as he read lives of the Saints and histories of the Orders, the exclamation, “I do well to be angry,” was often on his lips. For the wisdom, learning, and devotion of the Jesuits he had, however, a just respect. Geneva, with its grim logic and stark spirituality, suited nerves of a different temper from his. For a time Southey thought himself half a Quaker, but he desired more visible beauty and more historical charm than he could find in Quakerism. Needing a comely home for his spiritual affections, he found precisely what pleased him built in the pleasant Anglican close. With growing loyalty to the State, his loyalty to the Church could not but keep pace. He loved her tolerance, her culture; he fed upon her judicious and learned writers—Taylor, with his bright fancies like the little rings of the vine; South, hitting out straight from the shoulder at anarchy, fanaticism, and licentiousness, as Southey himself would have liked to hit; Jackson, whose weight of character made his pages precious as with golden bullion. After all, old Sarum had some advantages over Utopia.

The English Constitution consisting of Church and State, it seemed to Southey an absurdity in politics to give those persons power in the State whose duty it is to subvert the Church. Admit Catholics, he said, to every office of trust, emolument, or honour; only never admit them into Parliament. “The arguments about equal rights are fit only for a schoolboy’s declamation; it may as well be said that the Jew has a right to be a bishop, or the Quaker an admiral, as that the Roman Catholic has a right to a seat in the British Legislature; his opinions disqualify him.” To call this a question of toleration was impudence; Catholics were free to practise the rites of their religion; they had the full and free use of the press; perfect toleration was granted to the members of that church which, wherever dominant, tolerates no other. Catholic Emancipation would not conciliate Ireland; the great source of Irish misery had been, not England’s power, but her weakness, and those violences to which weakness resorts in self-defence; old sores were not to be healed by the admission of Catholic demagogues into Parliament. The measure styled Emancipation would assuredly be followed by the downfall of the Protestant Establishment in Ireland, and by the spread of Catholicism in English society. To Pyrrhonists one form of faith might seem as good or as bad as the other; but the great mass of the English people had not advanced so far in the march of intellect as to perceive no important difference between Catholic and Protestant doctrine, or between Catholic and Protestant morality. By every possible means, better the condition of the Irish peasantry; give them employment in public works; facilitate, for those who desire it, the means of emigration; extend the poor-laws to Ireland, and lay that impost on absentees in such a proportion as may compensate, in some degree, for their non-residence; educate the people; execute justice and maintain peace, and the cry of Catholic Emancipation may be safely disregarded.

So Southey pleaded in the _Quarterly Review_. With reference to Emancipation and to the Reform Bill, he and Wordsworth—who, perhaps, had not kept themselves sufficiently in relation with living men and the public sentiment of the day—were in their solitude gifted with a measure of the prophetic spirit, which in some degree explains their alarms. For the prophet who knows little of expediency and nothing of the manipulation of parties, nothing of the tangled skein of contending interests, sees the future in its moral causes, and he sees it in a vision. But he cannot date the appearances in his vision. Battle, and garments rolled in blood, and trouble, and dimness of anguish pass before him, and he proclaims what it is given him to see. It matters not a little, however, in the actual event, whether the battle be on the morrow or half a century hence; and the prophet furnishes us with no chronology, or at best with some vague time and times and half a time. New forces have arisen before the terrors of his prediction come to pass, and therefore, when they come to pass, their effect is often altogether different from that anticipated. Wordsworth and Southey were right in declaring that a vast and formidable change was taking place in the England of their day: many things which they, amid incredulous scoffs, announced, have become actual; others remain to be fulfilled. But the events have taken up their place in an order of things foreign to the conceptions of the prophets; the fire from heaven descends, but meanwhile we, ingenious sons of men, have set up a lightning-conductor.

Southey and the _Quarterly Review_ were often spoken of as a single entity. But the _Review_, in truth, never precisely represented his feelings and convictions. With Gifford he had no literary sympathies. Gifford’s heart was full of kindness, says Southey, for all living creatures except authors; _them_ he regarded as Isaac Walton did the worm. Against the indulgence of that temper Southey always protested; yet he was chosen to bear the reproach of having tortured Keats, and of having anonymously glorified himself at the expense of Shelley. Gifford’s omissions, additions, substitutions, often caused Southey’s article in the _Review_ to be very unlike the article which he had despatched to the editor in manuscript. Probably these changes were often made on warrantable grounds. Southey’s confidence in his own opinions, which always seemed to him to be based upon moral principles, was high; and he was not in the habit of diluting his ink. Phrases which sounded well in the library of Greta Hall had quite another sound in Mr. Murray’s office in Fleet Street.

On arriving in London for a short visit in the autumn of 1813, Southey learnt that the Prince Regent wished to confer on him the Laureateship, vacant by the death of Pye. Without consulting the Regent, Lord Liverpool had previously directed that the office should be offered to Walter Scott. On the moment came a letter from Scott informing Southey that he had declined the appointment, not from any foolish prejudice against holding it, but because he was already provided for, and would not engross emoluments which ought to be awarded to a man of letters who had no other views in life. Southey hesitated, having ceased for several years to produce occasional verses; but his friend Croker assured him that he would not be compelled to write odes as boys write exercises at stated times on stated subjects; that it would suffice if he wrote on great public events, or did not write, as the spirit moved him; and thus his scruples were overcome. In a little, low, dark room in the purlieus of St. James’—a solitary clerk being witness—the oath was duly administered by a fat old gentleman-usher in full buckle, Robert Southey swearing to be a faithful servant to the King, to reveal all treasons which might come to his knowledge, and to obey the Lord Chamberlain in all matters of the King’s service. It was Scott’s belief that his generosity had provided for his poorer brother bard an income of three or four hundred pounds a year. In reality the emolument was smaller and the task-work more irksome than had been supposed. The tierce of Canary, swilled by Ben Jonson and his poetic sons, had been wickedly commuted for a small sum; the whole net income amounted to 90_l._ But this, “the very least of Providence’s mercies,” as a poor clergyman said when pronouncing grace over a herring, secured an important happiness for Southey: he did not employ it, as Byron puts it, to butter his bread on both sides; he added twelve pounds to it, and vested it forthwith in an insurance upon his own life. “I have never felt any painful anxiety about providing for my family, ...” he writes to Scott; “but it is with the deepest feeling of thanksgiving that I have secured this legacy for my wife and children, and it is to you that I am primarily and chiefly indebted.”

Croker’s assurance was too hastily given. The birthday Ode, indeed, fell into abeyance during the long malady of George III.; but the New-Year’s Ode had still to be provided. Southey was fortunate in 1814; events worthy of celebration had taken place; a dithyramb, or rather an oration in lines of irregular length, was accordingly produced, and was forwarded to his musical yoke-fellow, Sir William Parsons. But the sight of Southey’s page, over which the longs and shorts meandered seemingly at their own sweet will, shocked the orderly mind of the chief musician. What kind of ear could Mr. Southey have? His predecessor, the lamented Mr. Pye, had written his Odes always in regular stanzas. What kind of action was this exhibited by the unbroken State Pegasus? Duly as each New Year approached, Southey set himself to what he called his _ode_ous job; it was the price he paid for the future comfort of his children. While his political assailants pictured the author of _Joan of Arc_ as a court-lacquey following in the train of the fat Adonis, he, with grim cheerfulness, was earning a provision for his girls; and had it not been a duty to kiss hands on the appointment, His Royal Highness the Prince Regent would never have seen his poet. Gradually the New-Year’s Ode ceased to be looked for, and Southey was emancipated. His verse-making as laureate occasionally rose into something higher than journeyman work; when public events stirred his heart to joy, or grief, or indignation, he wrote many admirable periods of measured rhetoric. _The Funeral Song for the Princess Charlotte_ is of a higher strain; a knell, heavy yet clear-toned, is tolled by its finely wrought octosyllabics.

A few months after the battle of Waterloo, which had so deeply moved Southey, he started with his wife, a rare voyager from Keswick, and his little daughter Edith May, on a pilgrimage to the scene of victory. The aunts remained to take care of Bertha, Kate, and Isabel, with the nine-years-old darling of all, the only boy, Herbert. With Bruges, “like a city of Elizabeth’s age—you expect to see a head with a ruff looking from the window,” Southey was beyond measure delighted. At Ghent he ransacked bookshops, and was pleased to see in the Beguinage the realization of his own and Rickman’s ideas on Sisterhoods. On a clear September day the travellers visited the battlefield; the autumnal sunshine with soft airs, and now and again a falling leaf, while the bees were busy with the year’s last flowers, suited well with the poet’s mood of thankfulness, tempered by solemn thought. When, early in December, they returned with a lading of toys to their beloved lake-country, little Edith had hardly recovered from an illness which had attacked her at Aix. It was seven o’clock in the evening by the time they reached Rydal, and to press forward and arrive while the children were asleep would be to defraud everyone of the first reward earned by so long absence. “A return home under fortunate circumstances has something of the character of a triumph, and requires daylight.” The glorious presence of Skiddaw, and Derwent bright under the winter sky, asked also for a greeting at noon rather than at night. A depth of grave and tender thankfulness lay below Southey’s joy that morning; it was twelve years since he had pitched his tent here beside the Greta; twelve years had made him feel the touch of time; but what blessings they had brought! all his heart’s desire was here—books, children, leisure, and a peace that passeth understanding. The instant hour, however, was not for meditation but for triumph:—

“O joyful hour, when to our longing home
The long-expected wheels at length drew nigh!
When the first sound went forth, ‘they come! they come!’
And hope’s impatience quicken’d every eye!
‘Never had man whom Heaven would heap with bliss
More glad return, more happy hour than this.’

“Aloft on yonder bench, with arms dispread,
My boy stood, shouting there his father’s name,
Waving his hat around his happy head;
And there a younger group his sisters came:
Smiling they stood with looks of pleased surprise
While tears of joy were seen in elder eyes.

“Soon all and each came crowding round to share
The cordial greeting, the beloved sight;
What welcomings of hand and lip were there!
And when those overflowings of delight
Subsided to a sense of quiet bliss,
Life hath no purer, deeper happiness.

“The young companion of our weary way
Found here the end desired of all her ills;
She who in sickness pining many a day
Hunger’d and thirsted for her native hills.
Forgetful now of suffering past and pain,
Rejoiced to see her own dear home again.

“Recovered now the homesick mountaineer
Sate by the playmate of her infancy,
The twin-like comrade,[11]—render’d doubly dear
For that long absence; full of life was she
With voluble discourse and eager mien
Telling of all the wonders she had seen.

“Here silently between her parents stood
My dark-eyed Bertha, timid as a dove;
And gently oft from time to time she woo’d
Pressure of hand, or word, or look of love,
With impulse shy of bashful tenderness,
Soliciting again the wished caress.

“The younger twain in wonder lost were they,
My gentle Kate and my sweet Isabel:
Long of our promised coming, day by day,
It had been their delight to hear and tell;
And now when that long-promised hour was come,
Surprise and wakening memory held them dumb.

...

“Soon they grew blithe as they were wont to be;
Her old endearments each began to seek;
And Isabel drew near to climb my knee,
And pat with fondling hand her father’s cheek;
With voice and touch and look reviving thus
The feelings which had slept in long disuse.

“But there stood one whose heart could entertain
And comprehend the fulness of the joy;
The father, teacher, playmate, was again
Come to his only and his studious boy;
And he beheld again that mother’s eye
Which with such ceaseless care had watched his infancy.

“Bring forth the treasures now—a proud display—
For rich as Eastern merchants we return!
Behold the black Beguine, the Sister grey,
The Friars whose heads with sober motion turn,
The Ark well filled with all its numerous hives,
Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japhet, and their wives.

“The tumbler loose of limb; the wrestlers twain;
And many a toy beside of quaint device,
Which, when his fleecy flocks no more can gain
Their pasture on the mountains hoar with ice,
The German shepherd carves with curious knife,
Earning in easy toil the food of frugal life.

“It was a group which Richter, had he viewed,
Might have deemed worthy of his perfect skill;
The keen impatience of the younger brood,
Their eager eyes and fingers never still;
The hope, the wonder, and the restless joy
Of those glad girls and that vociferous boy.

“The aged friend[12] serene with quiet smile,
Who in their pleasure finds her own delight;
The mother’s heart-felt happiness the while;
The aunt’s rejoicing in the joyful sight;
And he who in his gaiety of heart,
With glib and noisy tongue performed the showman’s part.”

It was manifest to a thoughtful observer, says De Quincey, that Southey’s golden equanimity was bound up in a trinity of chords, a threefold chain—in a conscience clear of offence, in the recurring enjoyments from his honourable industry, and in the gratification of his parental affections. In the light of Herbert’s smiles his father almost lived; the very pulses of his heart played in unison with the sound of his son’s laughter. “There was,” De Quincey goes on, “in his manner towards this child, and towards this only, something that marked an excess of delirious doating, perfectly unlike the ordinary chastened movement of Southey’s affections; and something also which indicated a vague fear about him; a premature unhappiness, as if already the inaudible tread of calamity could be divined, as if already he had lost him.” As a baby, while Edith was only “like an old book, ugly and good,” Herbert, in spite of his Tartar eyes, a characteristic of Southey babyhood, was already beautiful. At six he was more gentle and more loving, says Southey, than you can almost conceive. “He has just learnt his Greek alphabet, and is so desirous of learning, so attentive and so quick of apprehension, that, if it please God he should live, there is little doubt but that something will come out of him.” In April, 1809, Southey writes to Landor, twenty-four hours after an attack of croup which seized his boy had been subdued: “Even now I am far, very far, from being at ease. There is a love which passeth the love of women, and which is more lightly alarmed than the lightest jealousy. Landor, I am not a Stoic at home; I feel as you do about the fall of an old tree! but, O Christ! what a pang it is to look upon the young shoot and think it will be cut down! And this is the thought which almost at all times haunts me; it comes upon me in moments when I know not whether the tears that start are of love or of bitterness.”

The alarm of 1809 passed away, and Herbert grew to the age of nine, active and bright of spirit, yet too pale, and, like his father, hanging too constantly over his books; a finely organized being, delicate in his sensibilities, and prematurely accomplished. Before the snow had melted which shone on Skiddaw that day when the children welcomed home their parents, Herbert Southey lay in his grave. His disease was an affection of the heart, and for weeks his father, palsied by apprehension, and unable to put hand to his regular work, stood by the bedside, with composed countenance, with words of hope, and agonized heart. Each day of trial made his boy more dear. With a trembling pride Southey saw the sufferer’s behaviour, beautiful in this illness as in all his life; nothing could be more calm, more patient, more collected, more dutiful, more admirable. At last, worn with watching, Southey and his wife were prevailed upon to lie down. The good Mary Barker watched, and it is she who writes the following lines:—“Herbert!—that sweetest and most perfect of all children on this earth, who died in my arms at nine years of age, whose death I announced to his father and mother in their bed, where I had prayed and persuaded them to go. When Southey could speak, his first words were, ‘_The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!_’ Never can I forget that moment” (1816).

“I am perfectly resigned,” Southey wrote to Bedford on the most mournful of all days, “and do not give way to grief. Thank God I can control myself for the sake of others.” But next morning found him weak as a child, even weaker in body than in mind, for long anxiety had worn him to the bone, and while he tried to calm and console the rest, his limbs trembled under him. His first wild wish to fly from Keswick passed away; it was good to be there near the boy’s grave. Weak as he was, he flung himself upon his work. “I employ myself incessantly, taking, however, every day as much exercise as I can bear without injurious fatigue, which is not much.” “It would surprise you were you to see what I get through in a day.” “For the first week I did as much every day as would at other times have seemed the full and overflowing produce of three.” From his early discipline in the stoical philosophy some help now was gained; from his active and elastic mind the gain was more; but these would have been insufficient to support him without a heart-felt and ever-present faith that what he had lost was not lost for ever. A great change had indeed come upon him. He set his house in order, and made arrangements as if his own death were at hand. He resolved not to be unhappy, but the joyousness of his disposition had received its death-wound; he felt as if he had passed at once from boyhood to the decline of life. He tried dutifully to make head against his depression, but at times with poor success. “I employ myself, and have recovered strength, but in point of spirits I rather lose ground.” Still, there are hidden springs of comfort. “The head and flower of my earthly happiness is cut off. But I am _not_ unhappy.” “When I give way to tears, which is only in darkness or solitude, they are not tears of unmingled pain.” All beloved ones grew more precious; the noble fortitude of his wife made her more than ever a portion of his best self. His uncle’s boy, Edward, he could not love more than he had loved him before; but, “as far as possible, he will be to me hereafter,” writes Southey, “in the place of my son.” And in truth the blessing of Herbert’s boyhood remained with him still; a most happy, a most beautiful boyhood it had been; he was thankful for having possessed the child so long; “for worlds I would not but have been his father.” “I have abundant blessings left; for each and all of these I am truly thankful; but of all the blessings which God has given me, this child, who is removed, is the one I _still_ prize the most.” To relieve feelings which he dared not utter with his lips, he thought of setting about a monument in verse for Herbert and himself, which might make one inseparable memory for father and son. A page or two of fragmentary thoughts in verse and prose for this poetic monument exists, but Southey could not keep his imagination enough above his heart to dare to go on with it; to do so would have dissolved his heart anew. One or two of these holy scriptures of woe, truly red drops of Southey’s life-blood, will tell enough of this love passing the love of women.

“Thy life was a day; and sum it well, life is but a week of
such days—with how much storm and cold and darkness! Thine was
a sweet spring day—a vernal Sabbath, all sunshine, hope, and
promise.”

* * * * *

“And that name
In sacred silence buried, which was still
At morn and eve the never-wearying theme
Of dear discourse.”

* * * * *

“Playful thoughts
Turned now to gall and esil.”

* * * * *

“No more great attempts, only a few autumnal flowers like
second primroses, etc.”

* * * * *

“They who look for me in our Father’s kingdom
Will look for him also; inseparably
Shall we be remembered.”

* * * * *

“Come, then,
Pain and Infirmity—appointed guests,
My heart is ready.”

From the day of his son’s death Southey began to step down from the heights of life, with a steadfast foot, and head still held erect. He recovered cheerfulness, but it was as one who has undergone an amputation seeks the sunshine. Herbert’s grave anchored him in Keswick. An offer of 2000_l._ a year for a daily article in the _Times_ did not tempt him to London. His home, his books, his literary work, Skiddaw, Derwentwater, and Crosthwaite churchyard were too dear. Three years later came the unlooked-for birth of a second boy; and Cuthbert was loved by his father; but the love was chastened and controlled of autumnal beauty and seriousness.

When the war with France had ended, depression of trade was acutely felt in England; party spirit ran high, and popular passions were dangerously roused. In the spring of 1817, the Laureate saw to his astonishment a poem entitled _Wat Tyler_, by Robert Southey, advertised as just published. He had written this lively dramatic sketch in the full fervour of Republicanism twenty-three years previously; the manuscript had passed into other hands, and he had long ceased to think of it. The skulking rogue and the knavish publisher who now gave it to the world had chosen their time judiciously; this rebuke to the apostate of the _Quarterly_ would be a sweet morsel for gossip-mongers to roll under the tongue, an infallible pill to purge melancholy with all true children of progress. No fewer than sixty thousand copies, it is said, were sold. _Wat Tyler_ suited well with Southey’s nonage; it has a Bright rhetorical fierceness of humanity. The speech-making radical blacksmith, “still toiling, yet still poor,” his insulted daughter, her virtuous lover, the communist priest John Ball, whose amiable theology might be that of Mr. Belsham in his later days, stand over against the tyrant king, his Archiepiscopal absolver from oaths, the haughty nobles, and the servile minions of the law. There was nothing in the poem that could be remembered with shame, unless it is shameful to be generous and inexperienced at the age of twenty. But England in 1817 seemed charged with combustibles, and even so small a spark as this was not to be blown about without a care. The Prince Regent had been fired at; there were committals for treason; there were riots in Somersetshire; the swarm of Manchester Blanketeers announced a march to London; the Habeas Corpus was suspended; before the year was out, Brandreth and his fellows had been executed at Derby. Southey applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction to restrain the publication of his poem. It was refused by Lord Eldon, on the ground that the publication being one calculated to do injury to society, the author could not reclaim his property in it. There the matter might have dropped; but it seemed good to Mr. William Smith, representing liberal Norwich, where Southey had many friends, to take his seat in the House of Commons one evening with the _Quarterly Review_ in one pocket and _Wat Tyler_ in the other, and to read aloud contrasted extracts showing how the malignant renegade could play the parts, as it suited him, of a seditious firebrand and a servile courtier. Wynn on the spot administered a well-deserved rebuke; Wilberforce wrote to Southey that, had he been present, his voice would also have been heard. Coleridge vindicated him in the _Courier_. Seldom, indeed, was Southey drawn into controversy. When pelted with abuse, he walked on with uplifted head, and did not turn round; it seemed to him that he was of a stature to invite bespattering. His self-confidence was high and calm; that he possessed no common abilities, was certain: and the amount of toil which went into his books gave him a continual assurance of their worth which nothing could gainsay; he had no time for moods of dejection and self-distrust. But if Southey struck, he struck with force, and tried to leave his mark on his antagonist. To repel this attack made in the House of Commons, was a duty. _A Letter to William Smith, Esq., M.P._, was written, as Wordsworth wished, with the strength of masculine indignation; blow after blow is planted with sure effect; no word is wasted; there is skill in the hard hitting; and the antagonist fairly overthrown, Southey, with one glance of scorn, turns on his heel, and moves lightly away. “I wish you joy,” wrote Walter Scott, “of your triumphant answer.... Enough of this gentleman, who I think will not walk out of the round again to slander the conduct of individuals.” The concluding sentences of the Letter give in brief Southey’s fearless review of his unstained career.

“How far the writings of Mr. Southey may be found to deserve a
favourable acceptance from after-ages, time will decide; but a
name which, whether worthily or not, has been conspicuous in
the literary history of its age, will certainly not perish....
It will be related that he lived in the bosom of his family,
in absolute retirement; that in all his writings there
breathed the same abhorrence of oppression and immorality,
the same spirit of devotion, and the same ardent wishes for
the melioration of mankind; and that the only charge which
malice could bring against him was, that as he grew older, his
opinions altered concerning the means by which that melioration
was to be effected, and that as he learnt to understand the
institutions of his country, he learnt to appreciate them
rightly, to love, and to revere, and to defend them. It will
be said of him that in an age of personality he abstained
from satire; and that during the course of his literary life,
often as he was assailed, the only occasion on which he ever
condescended to reply was when a certain Mr. William Smith
insulted him in Parliament with the appellation of renegade.
On that occasion, it will be said, he vindicated himself, as
it became him to do, and treated his calumniator with just
and memorable severity. Whether it shall be added that Mr.
William Smith redeemed his own character by coming forward with
honest manliness, and acknowledging but is not of the slightest
importance to me.”