His Early Life.
To judge him more nearly we must give a slight trace of his history. Born down in Bristol (in whose neighborhood we found, you will remember, Chatterton, Mistress More, Coleridge, and others)—he was the son of a broken down linen-draper, who could help him little; but a great aunt—a starched woman of the Betsey Trotwood stamp—could and did befriend him, until it came to her knowledge, on a sudden, that he was plotting emigration to the Susquehanna, and plotting marriage with a dowerless girl of Bristol; then she dropped him, and the guardian aunt appears nevermore.
An uncle, however, who is a chaplain in the British service, helps him to Oxford—would have had him take orders—in which case we should have had, of a certainty, some day, Bishop Southey; and probably a very good one. But he has some scruples about the Creed, being over-weighted, perhaps, by intercourse with young Coleridge on the side of Unitarianism: “Every atom of grass,” he says, “is worth all the Fathers.”[3] He, however, accompanies the uncle to Portugal; dreams dreams and has poetic visions there in the orange-groves of Cintra; projects, too, a History of Portugal—which project unfortunately never comes to fulfilment. He falls in with the United States Minister, General Humphreys, who brings to his notice Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan,” which Southey is good enough to think “has some merit.”
Thereafter he comes back to his young wife; is much in London and thereabout; coming to know Charles Lamb, Rogers, and Moore, with other such. He is described at that day as tall—a most presentable man—with dark hair and eyes, wonderful arched brows; “head of a poet,” Byron said; looking up and off, with proud foretaste of the victories he will win; he has, too, very early, made bold literary thrust at that old story of Joan of Arc: a good topic, of large human interest, but not over successfully dealt with by him. After this came that extraordinary poem of Thalaba, the first of a triad of poems which excited great literary wonderment (the others being the Curse of Kehama and Madoc). They are rarely heard of now and scarcely known. Beyond that fragment from Kehama, beginning
“They sin who tell us Love can die,”
hardly a page from either has drifted from the high sea of letters into those sheltered bays where the makers of anthologies ply their trade. Yet no weak man could have written either one of these almost forgotten poems of Southey; recondite learning makes its pulse felt in them; bright fancies blaze almost blindingly here and there; old myths of Arabia and Welsh fables are galvanized and brought to life, and set off with special knowledge and cumbrous aids of stilted and redundant prosody; but all is utterly remote from human sympathies, and all as cold—however it may attract by its glitter—as the dead hand
“Shrivelled, and dry, and black,”
which holds the magic taper in the Dom Daniel cavern of Thalaba.