Such wisdom of the heart was justified; the year of growing love bore precious fruit. When Edith May was ten years old her father dedicated to her, in verses laden with a father’s tenderest thoughts and feelings, his Tale of Paraguay. He recalls the day of her birth, the preceding sorrow for his first child, whose infant features have faded from him like a passing cloud; the gladness of that singing month of May; the seasons that followed during which he observed the dawning of the divine light in her eyes; the playful guiles by which he won from her repeated kisses: to him these ten years seem like yesterday; but to her they have brought discourse of reason, with the sense of time and change:—
“And I have seen thine eyes suffused in grief
When I have said that with autumnal grey
The touch of old hath mark’d thy father’s head;
That even the longest day of life is brief,
And mine is falling fast into the yellow leaf.”
Other children followed, until a happy stir of life filled the house. Emma, the quietest of infants, whose voice was seldom heard, and whose dark-grey eyes too seldom shone in her father’s study, slipped quietly out of the world after a hand’s-breadth of existence; but to Southey she was no more really lost than the buried brother and sister were to the cottage girl of Wordsworth’s We are seven. “I have five children,” he says in 1809; “three of them at home, and two under my mother’s care in heaven.” Of all, the most radiantly beautiful was Isabel; the most passionately loved was Herbert. “My other two are the most perfect contrast you ever saw. Bertha, whom I call Queen Henry the Eighth, from her likeness to King Bluebeard, grows like Jonah’s gourd, and is the very picture of robust health; and little Kate hardly seems to grow at all, though perfectly well—she is round as a mushroom-button. Bertha, the bluff queen, is just as grave as Kate is garrulous; they are inseparable playfellows, and go about the house hand in hand.”
Among the inmates of Greta Hall, to overlook Lord Nelson and Bona Marietta, with their numerous successors, would be a grave delinquency. To be a cat, was to be a privileged member of the little republic to which Southey gave laws. Among the fragments at the end of The Doctor will be found a Chronicle History of the Cattery of Cat’s Eden; and some of Southey’s frolic letters are written as if his whole business in life were that of secretary for feline affairs in Greta Hall. A house, he declared, is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment unless there is in it a child rising three years old and a kitten rising six weeks; “kitten is in the animal world what the rosebud is in the garden.” Lord Nelson, an ugly specimen of the streaked-carroty or Judas-coloured kind, yet withal a good cat, affectionate, vigilant, and brave, was succeeded by Madame Bianchi, a beautiful and singular creature, white, with a fine tabby tail; “her wild eyes were bright, and green as the Duchess de Cadaval’s emerald necklace.” She fled away with her niece Pulcheria on the day when good old Mrs. Wilson died; nor could any allurements induce the pair to domesticate themselves again. For some time a cloud of doom seemed to hang over Cat’s Eden. Ovid and Virgil, Othello the Moor, and Pope Joan perished miserably. At last Fortune, as if to make amends for her unkindness, sent to Greta Hall almost together the never-to-be-enough-praised Rumpelstilzchen (afterwards raised for services against rats to be His Serene Highness the Archduke Rumpelstilzchen), and the equally-to-be-praised Hurly-burlybuss. With whom too soon we must close the catalogue.
The revenue to maintain this household was in the main won by Southey’s pen. “It is a difficult as well as a delicate task,” he wrote in the Quarterly Review, “to advise a youth of ardent mind and aspiring thoughts in the choice of a profession; but a wise man will have no hesitation in exhorting him to choose anything rather than literature. Better that he should seek his fortune before the mast, or with a musket on his shoulder and a knapsack on his back; better that he should follow the plough, or work at the loom or the lathe, or sweat over the anvil, than trust to literature as the only means of his support.” Southey’s own bent towards literature was too strong to be altered. But, while he accepted loyally the burdens of his profession as a man of letters, he knew how stout a back is needed to bear them month after month and year after year. Absolutely dependent on his pen he was at no time. His generous friend Wynn, upon coming of age, allowed him annually 160l., until, in 1807, he was able to procure for Southey a Government pension for literary services amounting, clear of taxes, to nearly the same sum. Southey had as truly as any man the pride of independence, but he had none of its vanity; there was no humiliation in accepting a service from one whom friendship had made as close as a brother. Men, he says, are as much better for the good offices which they receive as for those they bestow; and his own was no niggard hand. Knowing both to give and to take, with him the remembrance that he owed much to others was among the precious possessions of life which bind us to our kind with bonds of sonship, not of slavery. Of the many kindnesses which he received he never forgot one. “Had it not been for your aid,” he writes to Wynn, forty years after their first meeting in Dean’s Yard, “I should have been irretrievably wrecked when I ran upon the shoals, with all sail set, in the very outset of my voyage.” And to another good old friend, who from his own modest station applauded while Southey ran forward in the race:—“Do you suppose, Cottle, that I have forgotten those true and most essential acts of friendship which you showed me when I stood most in need of them? Your house was my house when I had no other. The very money with which I bought my wedding-ring and paid my marriage-fees was supplied by you. It was with your sisters I left Edith during my six months’ absence, and for the six months after my return it was from you that I received, week by week, the little on which we lived, till I was enabled to live by other means. It is not the settling of a cash account that can cancel obligations like these. You are in the habit of preserving your letters, and if you were not, I would entreat you to preserve this, that it might be seen hereafter.... My head throbs and my eyes burn with these recollections. Good-night! my dear old friend and benefactor.”