If Southey had not a companion by his side, the solitude of his ramble was unbroken; he never had the knack of forgathering with chance acquaintance. With intellectual and moral boldness, and with high spirits, he united a constitutional bashfulness and reserve. His retired life, his habits of constant study, and, in later years, his shortness of sight, fell in with this infirmity. He would not patronize his humbler neighbours; he had a kind of imaginative jealousy on behalf of their rights as independent persons; and he could not be sure of straightway discovering, by any genius or instinct of good-fellowship, that common ground whereon strangers are at home with one another. Hence—and Southey himself wished that it had been otherwise—long as he resided at Keswick, there were perhaps not twenty persons of the lower ranks whom he knew by sight. “After slightly returning the salutation of some passer-by,” says his son, “he would again mechanically lift his cap as he heard some well-known name in reply to his inquiries, and look back with regret that the greeting had not been more cordial.”
If the ice were fairly broken, he found it natural to be easy and familiar, and by those whom he employed he was regarded with affectionate reverence. Mrs. Wilson—kind and generous creature—remained in Greta Hall tending the children as they grew up, until she died, grieved for by the whole household. Joseph Glover, who created the scarecrow “Statues” for the garden—male and female created he them, as the reader may see them figured toward the close of The Doctor—Glover, the artist who set up Edith’s fantastic chimney-piece (“Well, Miss Southey,” cried honest Joseph, “I’ve done my Devils”), was employed by Southey during five-and-twenty years, ever since he was a ’prentice-boy. If any warm-hearted neighbour, known or unknown to him, came forward with a demand on Southey’s sympathies, he was sure to meet a neighbourly response. When the miller, who had never spoken to him before, invited the laureate to rejoice with him over the pig he had killed—the finest ever fattened—and when Southey was led to the place where that which had ceased to be pig and was not yet bacon, was hung up by the hind feet, he filled up the measure of the good man’s joy by hearty appreciation of a porker’s points. But Cumberland enthusiasm seldom flames abroad with so prodigal a blaze as that of the worthy miller’s heart.
Within the charmed circle of home, Southey’s temper and manners were full of a strong and sweet hilarity; and the home circle was in itself a considerable group of persons. The Pantisocratic scheme of a community was, after all, near finding a fulfilment, only that the Greta ran by in place of the Susquehanna, and that Southey took upon his own shoulders the work of the dead Lovell, and of Coleridge, who lay in weakness and dejection, whelmed under the tide of dreams. For some little time Coleridge continued to reside at Keswick, an admirable companion in almost all moods of mind, for all kinds of wisdom, and all kinds of nonsense. When he was driven abroad in search of health, it seemed as if a brightness were gone out of the air, and the horizon of life had grown definite and contracted. “It is now almost ten years,” Southey writes, “since he and I first met in my rooms at Oxford, which meeting decided the destiny of both.... I am perpetually pained at thinking what he ought to be, ... but the tidings of his death would come upon me more like a stroke of lightning than any evil I have ever yet endured.”
Mrs. Coleridge, with her children, remained at Greta Hall. That quaint little metaphysician, Hartley—now answering to the name of Moses, now to that of Job, the oddest of all God’s creatures—was an unceasing wonder and delight to his uncle: “a strange, strange boy, ‘exquisitely wild,’ an utter visionary, like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle of his own making. He alone is a light of his own. Of all human beings I never saw one so utterly naked of self.” When his father expressed surprise that Hartley should take his pleasure of wheel-barrow-riding so sadly, “The pity is”—explained little Job—“the pity is, I’se always thinking of my thoughts.” “‘I’m a boy of a very religious turn,’ he says; for he always talks of himself and examines his own character, just as if he were speaking of another person, and as impartially. Every night he makes an extempore prayer aloud; but it is always in bed, and not till he is comfortable there and got into the mood. When he is ready, he touches Mrs. Wilson, who sleeps with him, and says, ‘Now listen!’ and off he sets like a preacher.” Younger than Hartley was Derwent Coleridge, a fair, broad-chested boy, with merry eye and roguish lips, now grown out of that yellow frock in which he had earned his name of Stumpy Canary. Sara Coleridge, when her uncle came to Keswick after the death of his own Margery, was a little grand-lama at that worshipful age of seven months. A fall into the Greta, a year and a half later, helped to change her to the delicate creature whose large blue eyes would look up timidly from under her lace border and mufflings of muslin. No feeling towards their father save a reverent loyalty did the Coleridge children ever learn under Southey’s roof. But when the pale-faced wanderer returned from Italy, he surprised and froze his daughter by a sudden revelation of that jealousy which is the fond injustice of an unsatisfied heart, and which a child who has freely given and taken love finds it hard to comprehend. “I think my dear father,” writes Sara Coleridge, “was anxious that I should learn to love him and the Wordsworths and their children, and not cling so exclusively to my mother and all around me at home.” Love him and revere his memory she did; to Wordsworth she was conscious of owing more than to any other teacher or inspirer in matters of the intellect and imagination. But in matters of the heart and conscience the daily life of Southey was the book in which she read; he was, she would emphatically declare, “upon the whole, the best man she had ever known.”
But the nepotism of the most “nepotious” uncle is not a perfect substitute for fatherhood with its hopes and fears. May-morning of the year 1804 saw “an Edithling very, very ugly, with no more beauty than a young dodo,” nestling by Edith Southey’s side. A trembling thankfulness possessed the little one’s father; but when the Arctic weather changed suddenly to days of genial sunshine, and groves and gardens burst into living greenery, and rang with song, his heart was caught into the general joy. Southey was not without a presentiment that his young dodo would improve. Soon her premature activity of eye and spirits troubled him, and he tried, while cherishing her, to put a guard upon his heart. “I did not mean to trust my affections again on so frail a foundation—and yet the young one takes me from my desk and makes me talk nonsense as fluently as you perhaps can imagine.” When Sara Coleridge—not yet five years old, but already, as she half believed, promised in marriage to Mr. De Quincey—returned after a short absence to Greta Hall, she saw her baby cousin, sixteen months younger, and therefore not yet marriageable, grown into a little girl very fair, with thick golden hair, and round, rosy cheeks. Edith Southey inherited something of her father’s looks and of his swift intelligence; with her growing beauty of face and limbs a growing excellence of inward nature kept pace. At twenty she was the “elegant cygnet” of Amelia Opie’s album verses,
“’Twas pleasant to meet
And see thee, famed Swan of the Derwent’s fair tide,
With that elegant cygnet that floats by thy side”—
a compliment her father mischievously would not let her Elegancy forget. Those who would know her in the loveliness of youthful womanhood may turn to Wordsworth’s poem, The Triad, where she appears first of the three “sister nymphs” of Keswick and Rydal; or, Hartley Coleridge’s exquisite sonnet, To a lofty beauty, from her poor kinsman:
“Methinks thy scornful mood,