Meanwhile Drummond, an M.P. and a translator of Persius, who was going as ambassador, first to Palermo and then to Constantinople, was on the look-out for a secretary. The post would be obtained for Southey by his friend Wynn, if possible; this might lead to a consulship; why not to the consulship at Lisbon, with 1000l. a year? Such possibilities, however, could not prevent him from speedily visiting Coleridge and Keswick. “Time and absence make strange work with our affections,” so writes Southey; “but mine are ever returning to rest upon you. I have other and dear friends, but none with whom the whole of my being is intimate.... Oh! I have yet such dreams. Is it quite clear that you and I were not meant for some better star, and dropped by mistake into this world of pounds, shillings, and pence?” So for the first time Southey set foot in Keswick, and looked upon the lake and the hills which were to become a portion of his being, and which have taken him so closely, so tenderly, to themselves. His first feeling was one not precisely of disappointment, but certainly of remoteness from this northern landscape; he had not yet come out from the glow and the noble abandon of the South. “These lakes,” he says, “are like rivers; but oh for the Mondego and the Tagus! And these mountains, beautifully indeed are they shaped and grouped; but oh for the grand Monchique! and for Cintra, my paradise!”
Time alone was needed to calm and temper his sense of seeing; for when, leaving Mrs. Southey with her sister and Coleridge, he visited his friend Wynn at Llangedwin, and breathed the mountain air of his own Prince Madoc, all the loveliness of Welsh streams and rivers sank into his soul. “The Dee is broad and shallow, and its dark waters shiver into white and silver and hues of amber brown. No mud upon the shore—no bushes—no marsh plants—anywhere a child might stand dry-footed and dip his hand into the water.” And again a contrasted picture: “The mountain-side was stony, and a few trees grew among its stones; the other side was more wooded, and had grass on the top, and a huge waterfall thundered into the bottom, and thundered down the bottom. When it had nearly passed these rocky straits, it met another stream. The width of water then became considerable, and twice it formed a large black pool, to the eye absolutely stagnant, the froth of the waters that entered there sleeping upon the surface; it had the deadness of enchantment; yet was not the pool wider than the river above it and below it, where it foamed over and fell.” Such free delight as Southey had among the hills of Wales came quickly to an end. A letter was received offering him the position of private secretary to Mr. Corry, Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland, with a salary of four hundred pounds a year. Rickman was in Dublin, and this was Rickman’s doing. Southey, as he was in prudence bound to do, accepted the appointment, hastened back to Keswick, bade farewell for a little while to his wife, and started for Dublin in no cheerful frame of mind.
At a later time, Southey possessed Irish friends whom he honoured and loved; he has written wise and humane words about the Irish people. But all through his career Ireland was to Southey somewhat too much that ideal country—of late to be found only in the region of humorous-pathetic melodrama—in which the business of life is carried on mainly by the agency of bulls and blunder-busses; and it required a distinct effort on his part to conceive the average Teague or Patrick otherwise than as a potato-devouring troglodyte, on occasions grotesquely amiable, but more often with the rage of Popery working in his misproportioned features. Those hours during which Southey waited for the packet were among the heaviest of his existence. After weary tackings in a baffling wind, the ship was caught into a gale, and was whirled away, fifteen miles north of Dublin, to the fishing-town of Balbriggan. Then, a drive across desolate country, which would have depressed the spirits had it not been enlivened by the airs and humours of little Dr. Solomon, the unique, the omniscient, the garrulous, next after Bonaparte the most illustrious of mortals, inventor of the Cordial Balm of Gilead, and possessor of a hundred puncheons of rum. When the new private secretary arrived, the chancellor was absent; the secretary, therefore, set to work on rebuilding a portion of his Madoc. Presently Mr. Corry appeared, and there was a bow and a shake of hands; then he hurried away to London, to be followed by Southey, who, going round by Keswick, was there joined by his wife. From London Southey writes to Rickman, “The chancellor and the scribe go on in the same way. The scribe hath made out a catalogue of all books published since the commencement of ’97 upon finance and scarcity; he hath also copied a paper written by J.R. [John Rickman] containing some Irish alderman’s hints about oak-bark; and nothing more hath the scribe done in his vocation. Duly he calls at the chancellor’s door; sometimes he is admitted to immediate audience; sometimes kicketh his heels in the antechamber; ... sometimes a gracious message emancipates him for the day. Secrecy hath been enjoined him as to these State proceedings. On three subjects he is directed to read and research—corn-laws, finance, tythes, according to their written order.” The independent journals meanwhile had compared Corry and Southey, the two State conspirators, to Empson and Dudley; and delicately expressed a hope that the poet would make no false numbers in his new work.
Southey, who had already worn an ass’s head in one of Gillray’s caricatures, was not afflicted by the newspaper sarcasm; but the vacuity of such a life was intolerable; and when it was proposed that he should become tutor to Corry’s son, he brought his mind finally to the point of resigning “a foolish office and a good salary.” His notions of competence were moderate; the vagabondage between the Irish and English headquarters entailed by his office was irksome. His books were accumulating, and there was ample work to be done among them if he had but a quiet library of his own. Then, too, there was another good reason for resigning. A new future was opening for Southey. Early in the year (1802) his mother died. She had come to London to be with her son; there she had been stricken with mortal illness; true to her happy, self-forgetful instincts, she remained calm, uncomplaining, considerate for others. “Go down, my dear; I shall sleep presently,” she had said, knowing that death was at hand. With his mother, the last friend of Southey’s infancy and childhood was gone. “I calmed and curbed myself,” he writes, “and forced myself to employment; but at night there was no sound of feet in her bedroom, to which I had been used to listen, and in the morning it was not my first business to see her.” The past was past indeed. But as the year opened, it brought a happy promise; before summer would end, a child might be in his arms. Here were sufficient reasons for his resignation; a library and a nursery ought, he says, to be stationary.
To Bristol husband and wife came, and there found a small furnished house. After the roar of Fleet Street, and the gathering of distinguished men—Fuseli, Flaxman, Barry, Lamb, Campbell, Bowles—there was a strangeness in the great quiet of the place. But in that quiet Southey could observe each day the growth of the pile of manuscript containing his version of Amadis of Gaul, for which Longman and Rees promised him a munificent sixty pounds. He toiled at his History of Portugal, finding matter of special interest in that part which was concerned with the religious orders. He received from his Lisbon collection precious boxes folio-crammed. “My dear and noble books! Such folios of saints! dull books enough for my patience to diet upon, till all my flock be gathered together into one fold.” Sixteen volumes of Spanish poetry are lying uncut in the next room; a folio yet untasted jogs his elbow; two of the best and rarest chronicles coyly invite him. He had books enough in England to employ three years of active industry. And underlying all thoughts of the great Constable Nuño Alvares Pereyra, of the King D. Joaõ I., and of the Cid, deeper than the sportsman pleasure of hunting from their lair strange facts about the orders Cistercian, Franciscan, Dominican, Jesuit, there was a thought of that new-comer whom, says Southey, “I already feel disposed to call whelp and dog, and all those vocables of vituperation by which a man loves to call those he loves best.”
In September, 1802, was born Southey’s first child, named Margaret Edith, after her mother and her dead grandmother; a flat-nosed, round-foreheaded, grey-eyed, good-humoured girl. “I call Margaret,” he says, in a sober mood of fatherly happiness, “by way of avoiding all commonplace phraseology of endearment, a worthy child and a most excellent character. She loves me better than any one except her mother; her eyes are as quick as thought; she is all life and spirit, and as happy as the day is long; but that little brain of hers is never at rest, and it is painful to see how dreams disturb her.” For Margery and her mother and the folios a habitation must be found. Southey inclined now towards settling in the neighbourhood of London—now towards Norwich, where Dr. Sayers and William Taylor would welcome him—now towards Keswick; but its horrid latitude, its incessant rains! On the whole, his heart turned most fondly to Wales; and there, in one of the loveliest spots of Great Britain, in the Vale of Neath, was a house to let, by name Maes Gwyn. Southey gave his fancy the rein, and pictured himself “housed and homed” in Maes Gwyn, working steadily at the History of Portugal, and now and again glancing away from his work to have a look at Margery seated in her little great chair. But it was never to be; a difference with the landlord brought to an end his treaty for the house, and in August the child lay dying. It was bitter to part with what had been so long desired—during seven childless years—and what had grown so dear. But Southey’s heart was strong; he drew himself together, returned to his toil, now less joyous than before, and set himself to strengthen and console his wife.
Bristol was henceforth a place of mournful memories. “Edith,” writes Southey, “will be nowhere so well as with her sister Coleridge. She has a little girl some six months old, and I shall try and graft her into the wound while it is yet fresh.” Thus Greta Hall received its guests (September, 1803). At first the sight of little Sara Coleridge and her baby cooings caused shootings of pain on which Southey had not counted. Was the experiment of this removal to prove a failure? He still felt as if he were a feather driven by the wind. “I have no symptoms of root-striking here,” he said. But he spoke, not knowing what was before him; the years of wandering were indeed over; here he had found his home.