From Eliza Cook's Journal.
THE WIVES OF SOUTHEY, COLERIDGE, AND LOVELL.
Southey, Coleridge, and Lovell, three poets, married three sisters, the Misses Fricker of Bristol. They were all alike poor when they married. Southey's aunt shut her door in his face when she found he was resolved on marrying in such circumstances; and he, postponing entry upon the married life, though he had contracted the responsibility of husband, parted from his wife at the church door, and set out on a six months' visit to Portugal, preparatory to entering on the study of the legal profession. Southey committed his maiden wife to the care of Mr. Cottle's sisters during his absence. "Should I perish by shipwreck," he wrote from Falmouth to Mr. Cottle, "or by any other casualty, I have relations whose prejudice will yield to the anguish of affection, and who will love, cherish, and give all possible consolation to my widow." With these words Southey set sail for Portugal, and his wife, who had persuaded him to go, and cried when he was going, though she would not then have permitted him to stay, meekly retired to her place of refuge, wearing her wedding-ring round her neck.
Southey returned to England, and commenced the study of the law, but after a year's drudgery gave it up. His wife joined him in a second visit to Portugal, and on his return he commenced the laborious literary career which he pursued till his death. He enjoyed on the whole a happy married life; took pleasure in his home and his family; loving his children and his wife Edith dearly. This is one of his own pictures:—"Glance into the little room where sits the gray-haired man, 'working hard and getting little—a bare maintenance, and hardly that; writing poems and history for posterity with his whole heart and soul; one daily progressing in learning, not so learned as he is poor, not so poor as proud, not so proud as happy.'" Great men have invited him to London, and he is now answering the invitation. The thought of the journey plagues him. "Oh dear, oh dear!" he writes, "there is such a comfort in one's old coat and old shoes, one's own chair and own fireside, one's own writing-desk and own library—with a little girl climbing up to my neck and saying, 'Don't go to London, papa, you must stay with Edith'—and a little boy whom I have taught to speak the language of cats, dogs, cuckoos, jackasses, &c., before he can articulate a word of his own—there is such a comfort in all these things, that transportation to London seems a heavier punishment than any sins of mine deserve." But a sad calamity fell upon him in his old age. His dear Edith was suddenly bereft of reason. "Forty years," he writes to Grosvenor Bedford from York, "has she been the life of my life—and I have left her this day in a lunatic asylum." In the same letter he expresses the resignation of a Christian and the confident courage of a man. "God, who has visited me with this affliction," he says, "has given me strength to bear it, and will, I know, support me to the end, whatever that may be. To-morrow I return to my poor children. I have much to be thankful for under this visitation. For the first time in my life (he was sixty years old) I am so far beforehand with the world that my means are provided for the whole of next year, and that I can meet this expenditure, considerable in itself, without any difficulty."
Mrs. Southey, after two years' absence, returned to Keswick, the family home, and closed her pitiable existence there. Southey was now a broken-down man. "There is no one," he mournfully writes, "to partake with me the recollections of the best and happiest portion of my life; and for that reason, were there no other, such recollections must henceforth be purely painful, except when I collect them with the prospects of futurity." Two years after, however, Southey married again: the marriage was one of respect on the part of Caroline Bowles, the gifted authoress, who was his choice, and probably of convenience and friendship on the part of Southey. We have heard that the union greatly tended to his comfort, and that his wife tenderly soothed and cheered his declining years.
Southey, in addition to maintaining his own wife and family at Keswick by his literary labors, had the families of his two sisters-in-law occasionally thrown upon his hands. He was not two-and-twenty when Mr. Lovell, who married his wife's sister, fell ill of fever, died, and left his widow and child without the slightest provision. Robert Southey took mother and child at once to his humble hearth, and there the former found happiness until his death. Coleridge, not sufficiently instructed by a genius to which his contemporaries did homage, in a wayward and unpardonable mood withdrew himself from the consolations of home; and in their hour of desertion his wife and children were saved half the knowledge of their hardships by finding a second husband and another father in the sanctuary provided for them by Robert Southey.
Coleridge was unpunctual, unbusiness-like, improvident, and dreamy, to the full extent to which poets are said proverbially to be. When he married—his pantisocratic Owenite scheme having just been exploded, and his lectures at Bristol having proved a failure—he retired with Sara Fricker, his wife, to a cottage at Clevedon, near Bristol. Though the cottage was a poor one, consisting of little more than four bare walls, for which he paid only £5 annual rental, he and his wife made it pretty snug with the aid of the funds supplied by their constant friend, Mr. Cottle, the Bristol bookseller. Coleridge decorated this cottage with all the graces that his imagination and fancy could throw around it. It is alluded to in many of his poems:—
"Low was our pretty cot! our tallest rose
Peep'd at the chamber window. We could hear
At silent noon, and eve, and early morn,
The sea's faint murmur. In the open air
Our myrtles blossom'd, and across the porch
Thick jasmines twin'd: the little landscape round
Was green and woody, and refreshed the eye.
It was a spot which you might aptly call
The valley of seclusion."
But his loved young wife was not forgotten; for again he sings:—
"My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclin'd
Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is
To sit beside our cot—our cot o'ergrown
With white-flowered jasmine, and the broad leav'd myrtle
(Meet emblems they of innocence and love!)
And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light,
Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve,
Serenely brilliant (such should wisdom be!)
Shine opposite."
Here their first child was born—Hartley, the dreamer—on whom the happy parent shed tears of joy:—
"But when I saw it on its mother's arm,
And hanging at her bosom (she the while
Bent o'er its features with a tearful smile,)
Then I was thrill'd and melted, and most warm
Impress'd a father's kiss; and all beguil'd
Of dark remembrance and presageful fear,
I seem'd to see an angel's form appear—
'Twas even thine, beloved woman mild!
So for the mother's sake the child was dear,
And dearer was the mother for the child."
But writing poetry, reading Hartley and Condillac, would not make the poet's pot boil at all briskly, and so he had to go a little nearer to the world, and went back to Bristol. Coleridge, however, wanted application, and could scarcely be induced to work, even though the prospect of liberal remuneration was offered to him. Hence, a few years after marriage, in July, 1796, we find him thus groaning in the spirit to a friend: "It is my duty and business to thank God for all his dispensations, and to believe them the best possible; but, indeed, I think I should have been more thankful if He had made me a journeyman shoemaker, instead of an author, by trade. I have left my friends, I have left plenty," &c. "So I am forced to write for bread! with the nights of poetic enthusiasm, when every minute I am hearing a groan from my wife—groans, and complaints, and sickness! The present hour I am in a quickset of embarrassments, and whichever way I turn, a thorn runs into me! The future is a cloud and thick darkness! Poverty, perhaps, and the thin faces of them that want bread looking up to me," &c. This was not the kind of spirit to make a wife happy—very different indeed from the manly, courageous, and self-helping Southey—and the poor wife suffered much. Whatever Coleridge touched failed: his fourpenny paper, the Watchman, was an abortion; and the verses he wrote for a London paper did little for him. He next preached for a short time among the Unitarians, deriving a very precarious living from that source; when at length the Messrs. Wedgwood, struck by his great talents, granted him an annuity of £150 to enable him to devote himself to study. Then he went to Germany, leaving his wife and little family to the hospitality of Southey; and returned and settled down to the precarious life of a writer for the newspapers: his eloquent conversation producing unbounded admiration, but very little "grist." He was often distressed for money, wasting what he had by indulgence in opium, to which he was at one time a fearful victim. The great and unquestionable genius of Coleridge was expended chiefly on projections. He was a man who was capable of greatly adorning the literature of his time, and of creating an altogether new era in its history; but he could not or would not work, and his life was passed in dreamy idleness, in self-inflicted poverty, often in poignant misery, in gloomy regrets, and in unfulfilled designs. We fear the life of Mrs. Coleridge was not a happy one, good and affectionate though she was as a wife and mother.