Robert Southey.
I have taken the reader upon this stroll through a bit of the Lake country of England that we might find the poet Dr. Southey[1] in his old home at Keswick. It is not properly in the town, but just across the Greta River, which runs southward of the town. There, the modest but good-sized house has been standing for these many years upon a grassy knoll, in its little patch of quiet lawn, with scattered show of trees—but never so many as to forbid full view up the long stretch of Derwent Water. His own hexameters shall tell us something of this view:
“I stood at the window beholding
Mountain and lake and vale; the valley disrobed of its verdure;
Derwent, retaining yet from eve a glassy reflection
Where his expanded breast, then still and smooth as a mirror,
Under the woods reposed; the hills that calm and majestic
Lifted their heads into the silent sky, from far Glaramara,
Bleacrag, and Maidenmawr to Grisedal and westernmost Wython,
Dark and distinct they rose. The clouds had gathered above them
High in the middle air, huge purple pillowy masses,
While in the West beyond was the last pale tint of the twilight,
Green as the stream in the glen, whose pure and chrysolite waters
Flow o’er a schistous bed.”
This may be very true picturing; but it has not the abounding flow of an absorbing rural enthusiasm; there is too sharp a search in it for the assonance, the spondees and the alliteration—to say nothing of the mineralogy. Indeed, though Southey loved those country ways and heights, of which I have given you a glimpse, and loved his daily walks round about Keswick and the Derwent, and loved the bracing air of the mountains—I think he loved these things as the feeders and comforters of his physical rather than of his spiritual nature. We rarely happen, in his verse, upon such transcripts of out-of-door scenes as are inthralling, and captivate our finer senses; nor does he make the boughs and blossoms tell such stories as filtered through the wood-craft of Chaucer.
Notwithstanding this, it is to that home of Southey, in the beautiful Lake country, that we must go for our most satisfying knowledge of the man. He was so wedded to it; he so loved the murmur of the Greta; so loved his walks; so loved the country freedom; so loved his workaday clothes and cap and his old shoes;[2] so loved his books—double-deep in his library, and running over into hall and parlor and corridors; loved, too, the children’s voices that were around him there—not his own only, but those always next, and almost his own—those of the young Coleridges. These were stranded there, with their mother (sister of Mrs. Southey), owing to the rueful neglect of their father—the bard and metaphysician. I do not think this neglect was due wholly to indifference. Coleridge sidled away from his wife and left her at Keswick in that old home of his own,—where he knew care was good—afraid to encounter her clear, honest, discerning—though unsympathetic—eyes, while he was putting all resources and all subterfuges to the feeding of that opiate craze which had fastened its wolfish fangs upon his very soul.
And Southey had most tender and beautiful care for those half-discarded children of the “Ancient Mariner.” He writes in this playful vein to young Hartley (then aged eleven), who is away on a short visit:
“Mr. Jackson has bought a cow, but he has had no calf since you left him. Edith [his own daughter] grows like a young giantess, and has a disposition to bite her arm, which you know is a very foolish trick. Your [puppy] friend Dapper, who is, I believe, your God-dog, is in good health, though he grows every summer graver than the last. I am desired to send you as much love as can be enclosed in a letter. I hope it will not be charged double on that account at the post-office. But there is Mrs. Wilson’s love, Mr. Jackson’s, your Aunt Southey’s, your Aunt Lovell’s and Edith’s; with a purr from Bona Marietta [the cat], an open-mouthed kiss from Herbert [the baby], and three wags of the tail from Dapper. I trust they will all arrive safe. Yr. dutiful uncle.”
And the same playful humor, and disposition to evoke open-eyed wonderment, runs up and down the lines of that old story of Bishop Hatto and the rats; and that other smart slap at the barbarities of war—which young people know, or ought to know, as the “Battle of Blenheim”—wherein old Kaspar says,—
“it was a shocking sight
After the field was won;
For many thousand bodies here
Lay rotting in the sun.
But things like that, you know, must be,
After a famous Victory.
Great praise the Duke of Marlboro’ won
And our good Prince Eugene;
‘Why, ’twas a very wicked thing!’
Said little Wilhelmine.
‘Nay—nay—my little girl,’ quoth he,
‘It was a famous Victory.’”
Almost everybody has encountered these Southeyan verses, and that other, about Mary the “Maid of the Inn,” in some one or other of the many “collections” of drifting poetry. There are very few, too, who have not, some day, read that most engaging little biography of Admiral Nelson, which tells, in most straightforward and simple and natural way, the romantic story of a life full of heroism, and scored with stains. I do not know, but—with most people—a surer and more lasting memory of Southey would be cherished by reason of those unpretending writings already named, and by knowledge of his quiet, orderly, idyllic home-life among the Lakes of Cumberland—tenderly and wisely provident of the mixed household committed to his care—than by the more ambitious things he did, or by the louder life he lived in the controversialism and politics of the day.