It was evening of the 17th of October, a dark and gusty evening of falling rain and miry ways. Within Aunt Tyler’s house in College Green, Bristol, a storm was bursting; she had heard it all at last—Pantisocracy, America, Miss Fricker. Out of the house he must march; there was the door; let her never see his face again. Southey took his hat, looked for the last time in his life at his aunt then stepped out into the darkness and the rain. “Why sir, you ben’t going to Bath at this time of night and in this weather?” remonstrated poor Shadrach. Even so; and with a friendly whisper master and man parted. Southey had not a penny in his pocket, and was lightly clad. At Lovell’s he luckily found his father’s great-coat; he swallowed a glass of brandy and set off on foot. Misery makes one acquainted with strange road-fellows. On the way he came upon an old man, drunk, and hardly able to stumble forward through the night: the young pantisocrat, mindful of his fellow-man, dragged him along nine miles amid rain and mire. Then, with weary feet, he reached Bath and there was his mother to greet him with surprise, and to ask for explanations. “Oh, Patience, Patience, thou hast often helped poor Robert Southey, but never didst thou stand him in more need than on Friday, the 17th of October, 1794.”
For a little longer the bow of hope shone in the West somewhere over the Susquehanna, and then it gradually grew faint and faded. Money, that huge evil, sneered its cold negations. The chiefs consulted, and Southey proposed that a house and farm should be taken in Wales where their principles might be acted out until better days enabled them to start upon their voyage. One pantisocrat at least, could be happy with Edith, brown bread, and wild Welsh raspberries. But Coleridge objected; their principles could not be fairly tested under the disadvantage of an effete and adverse social state surrounding them; besides, where was the purchase-money to come from? how were they to live until the gathering of their first crops? It became clear that the realization of their plan must be postponed. The immediate problem was, How to raise 150l.? With such a sum they might both qualify by marriage for membership in the pantisocratical community. After that, the rest would somehow follow.
How, then, to raise 150l.? Might they not start a new magazine and become joint editors? The Telegraph had offered employment to Southey. “Hireling writer to a newspaper! ’Sdeath! ’tis an ugly title; but n’importe. I shall write truth, and only truth.” The offer, however, turned out to be that of a reporter’s place; and his troublesome guest, honesty, prevented his contributing to The True Briton. But he and Coleridge could at least write poetry, and perhaps publish it with advantage to themselves; and they could lecture to a Bristol audience. With some skirmishing lectures on various political subjects of immediate interest, Coleridge began; many came to hear them, and the applause was loud. Thus encouraged, he announced and delivered two remarkable courses of lectures—one, A Comparative View of the English Rebellion under Charles I. and the French Revolution; the other, On Revealed Religion: its Corruptions and its Political Views. Southey did not feel tempted to discuss the origin of evil or the principles of revolution. He chose as his subject a view of the course of European history from Solon and Lycurgus to the American War. His hearers were pleased by the graceful delivery and unassuming self-possession of the young lecturer, and were quick to recognize the unusual range of his knowledge, his just perception of facts, his ardour and energy of conviction. One lecture Coleridge begged permission to deliver in Southey’s place—that on the Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Roman Empire. Southey consented, and the room was thronged but no lecturer appeared; they waited; still no lecturer. Southey offered an apology, and the crowd dispersed in no happy temper. It is likely, adds that good old gossip Cottle, who tells the story, “that at this very moment Mr. Coleridge might have been found at No. 48 College Street, composedly smoking his pipe, and lost in profound musing on his divine Susquehanna.”
The good Cottle—young in 1795, a publisher, and unhappily a poet—rendered more important service to the two young men than that of smoothing down their ruffled tempers after this incident. Southey, in conjunction with Lovell, had already published a slender volume of verse. The pieces by Southey recall his schoolboy joys and sorrows, and tell of his mother’s tears, his father’s death, his friendship with “Urban,” his love of “Ariste,” lovely maid! his delight in old romance, his discipleship to Rousseau. They are chiefly of interest as exhibiting the diverse literary influences to which a young writer of genius was exposed in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Here the couplet of Pope reappears, and hard by the irregular ode as practised by Akenside, the elegy as written by Gray, the unrhymed stanza which Collins’s Evening made a fashion, the sonnet to which Bowles had lent a meditative grace and the rhymeless measures imitated by Southey from Sayers, and afterwards made popular by his Thalaba. On the last page of this volume appear “Proposals for publishing by subscription Joan of Arc;” but subscriptions came slowly in. One evening Southey read for Cottle some books of Joan. “It can rarely happen,” he writes “that a young author should meet with a bookseller as inexperienced and as ardent as himself.” Cottle offered to publish the poem in quarto, to make it the handsomest book ever printed in Bristol, to give the author fifty copies for his subscribers, and fifty pounds to put forthwith into his purse. Some dramatic attempts had recently been made by Southey, Wat Tyler, of which we shall hear more at a later date, and the Fall of Robespierre, undertaken by Coleridge, Lovell, and Southey, half in sport—each being pledged to produce an act in twenty-four hours. These were now forgotten, and all his energies were given to revising and in part recasting Joan. In six weeks his epic had been written; its revision occupied six months.
With summer came a great sorrow, and in the end of autumn a measureless joy. “He is dead,” Southey writes, “my dear Edmund Seward! after six weeks’ suffering.... You know not, Grosvenor, how I loved poor Edmund: he taught me all that I have of good.... There is a strange vacancy in my heart.... I have lost a friend, and such a one!” And then characteristically come the words: “I will try, by assiduous employment, to get rid of very melancholy thoughts.” Another consolation Southey possessed: during his whole life he steadfastly believed that death is but the removal of a spirit from earth to heaven; and heaven for him meant a place where cheerful familiarity was natural, where, perhaps, he himself would write more epics and purchase more folios. As Baxter expected to meet among the saints above Mr. Hampden and Mr. Pym, so Southey counted upon the pleasure of having long talks with friends, of obtaining introductions to eminent strangers; above all, he looked forward to the joy of again embracing his beloved ones:
“Often together have we talked of death;
How sweet it were to see
All doubtful things made clear;
How sweet it were with powers
Such as the Cherubim