The Collected Writing of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II

by Thomas De Quincey

But about the last I cannot be wrong; for I remember laughing with a sense of something peculiarly droll in the substitution of the stilted phrase—"the great Botanic Bay," for our ordinary week-day name Botany Bay, so redolent of thieves and pickpockets.

Southey walked with us that morning for about five miles on our road towards Grasmere, which brought us to the southern side of Shoulthwaite Moss, and into the sweet solitary little vale of Legbesthwaite. And, by the way, he took leave of us at the gate of a house, one amongst the very few (five or six in all) just serving to redeem that valley from absolute solitude, which some years afterwards became, in a slight degree, remarkable to me from two little incidents by which it connected itself with my personal experiences. One was, perhaps, scarcely worth recording. It was simply this—that Wordsworth and myself having, through a long day's rambling, alternately walked and rode with a friend of his who happened to have a travelling carriage with him, and who was on his way to Keswick, agreed to wait hereabouts until Wordsworth's friend, in his abundant kindness, should send back his carriage to take us, on our return to Grasmere, distant about eight miles. It was a lovely summer evening; but, as it happened that we ate our breakfast early, and had eaten nothing at all throughout a long summer's day, we agreed to "sorn" upon the goodman of the house, whoever he might happen to be, Catholic or Protestant, Jew, Gentile, or Mahometan, and to take any bone that he would be pleased to toss to such hungry dogs as ourselves. Accordingly we repaired to his gate; we knocked, and, forthwith it was opened to us by a man-mountain, who listened benignantly to our humble request, and ushered us into a comfortable parlour. All sorts of refreshments he continued to shower upon us for a space of two hours: it became evident that our introducer was the master of the house: we adored him in our thoughts as an earthly providence to hungry wayfarers; and we longed to make his acquaintance. But, for some inexplicable reason, that must continue to puzzle all future commentators on Wordsworth and his history, he never made his appearance. Could it be, we thought, that, without the formality of a sign, he, in so solitary a region, more than twentyfive miles distant from Kendal (the only town worthy of the name throughout the adjacent country), exercised the functions of a landlord, and that we ought to pay him for his most liberal hospitality? Never was such a dilemma from the foundation of Legbesthwaite. To err, in either direction, was damnable: to go off without paying, if he were an innkeeper, made us swindlers; to offer payment if he were not, and supposing that he had been inundating us with his hospitable bounties simply in the character of a natural-born gentleman, made us the most unfeeling of mercenary ruffians. In the latter case we might expect a duel; in the former, of course, the treadmill. We were deliberating on this sad alternative, and I, for my part was voting in favour of the treadmill, when the sound of wheels was heard, and, in one minute, the carriage of his friend drew up to the farmer's gate; the crisis had now arrived, and we perspired considerably; when in came the frank Cumberland lass who had been our attendant. To her we propounded our difficulty—and lucky it was we did so, for she assured us that her master was an awful man, and would have "brained" us both if we had insulted him with the offer of money. She, however, honoured us by accepting the price of some female ornament.

I made a memorandum at the time, to ascertain the peculiar taste of this worthy Cumberland farmer, in order that I might, at some future opportunity, express my thanks to him for his courtesy; but, alas! for human resolutions, I have not done so to this moment; and is it likely that he, perhaps sixty years old at that time (1813), is alive at present, twenty-five years removed? Well, he may be; though I think that exceedingly doubtful, considering the next anecdote relating to the same house:—Two, or, it may be, three years after this time, I was walking to Keswick, from my own cottage in Grasmere. The distance was thirteen miles; the time just nine o'clock; the night a cloudy moonlight, and intensely cold. I took the very greatest delight in these nocturnal walks through the silent valleys of Cumberland and Westmoreland; and often at hours far later than the present. What I liked in this solitary rambling was, to trace the course of the evening through its household hieroglyphics from the windows which I passed or saw: to see the blazing fires shining through the windows of houses, lurking in nooks far apart from neighbours; sometimes, in solitudes that seemed abandoned to the owl, to catch the sounds of household mirth; then, some miles further, to perceive the time of going to bed; then the gradual sinking to silence of the house; then the drowsy reign of the cricket; at intervals, to hear church-clocks or a little solitary chapel-bell, under the brows of mighty hills, proclaiming the hours of the night, and flinging out their sullen knells over the graves where "the rude forefathers of the hamlet slept"—where the strength and the loveliness of Elizabeth's time, or Cromwell's, and through so many fleeting generations that have succeeded, had long ago sunk to rest. Such was the sort of pleasure which I reaped in my nightly walks—of which, however, considering the suspicions of lunacy which it has sometimes awoke, the less I say, perhaps, the better. Nine o'clock it was—and deadly cold as ever March night was made by the keenest of black frosts, and by the bitterest of north winds—when I drew towards the gate of our huge and hospitable friend. A little garden there was before the house; and in the centre of this garden was placed an arm-chair, upon which arm-chair was sitting composedly—but I rubbed my eyes, doubting the very evidence of my own eyesight—a or the huge man in his shirt-sleeves; yes, positively not sunning but mooning himself—apricating himself in the occasional moonbeams; and, as if simple star-gazing from a sedentary station were not sufficient on such a night, absolutely pursuing his astrological studies, I repeat, in his shirt-sleeves! Could this be our hospitable friend, the man-mountain? Secondly, was it any man at all? Might it not be a scarecrow dressed up to frighten the birds? But from what—to frighten them from what at that season of the year? Yet, again, it might be an ancient scarecrow—a superannuated scarecrow, far advanced in years. But, still, why should a scarecrow, young or old, sit in an arm-chair? Suppose I were to ask. Yet, where was the use of asking a scarecrow? And, if not a scarecrow, where was the safety of speaking too inquisitively, on his own premises, to a man-mountain? The old dilemma of the duel or the treadmill, if I should intrude upon his grounds at night, occurred to me; and I watched the anomalous object in silence for some minutes. At length the monster (for such at any rate it was, scarecrow or not scarecrow) solemnly raised his hand to his face, perhaps taking a pinch of snuff, and thereby settled one question. But that settled only irritated my curiosity the more upon a second: what hallucination of the brain was it that could induce a living man to adopt so very absurd a line of conduct? Once I thought of addressing him thus:—Might I presume so far upon your known courtesy to wayfaring strangers as to ask—Is it the Devil who prompts you to sit in your shirt-sleeves, as if meditating a camisade, or to woo al fresco pleasures on such a night as this? But, as Dr. Y., on complaining that, whenever he looked out of the window, he was sure to see Mr. X. lounging about the quadrangle, was effectually parried by Mr. X. retorting that, whenever he lounged in the quadrangle, he was sure to see the Doctor looking out of the window, so did I anticipate a puzzling rejoinder from the former, with regard to my own motives for haunting the roads as a nocturnal tramper, without a rational object that I could make intelligible. I thought, also, of the fate which attended the Calendars, and so many other notorious characters in the "Arabian Nights," for unseasonable questions, or curiosity too vivacious. And, upon the whole, I judged it advisable to pursue my journey in silence, considering the time of night, the solitary place, and the fancy of our enormous friend for "braining" those whom he regarded as ugly customers. And thus it came about that this one house has been loaded in my memory with a double mystery, that too probably never can be explained: and another torment had been prepared for the curious of future ages.

Of Southey, meantime, I had learned, upon this brief and hurried visit, so much in confirmation or in extension of my tolerably just preconceptions with regard to his character and manners, as left me not a very great deal to add, and nothing at all to alter, through the many years which followed of occasional intercourse with his family, and domestic knowledge of his habits. A man of more serene and even temper could not be imagined; nor more uniformly cheerful in his tone of spirits; nor more unaffectedly polite and courteous in his demeanour to strangers; nor more hospitable in his own wrong—I mean by the painful sacrifices which hospitality entailed upon him of time so exceedingly precious that, during his winter and spring months of solitude, or whenever he was left absolute master of its distribution, every half hour in the day had its peculiar duty. In the still "weightier matters of the law," in cases that involved appeals to conscience and high moral principle, I believe Southey to be as exemplary a man as can ever have lived. Were it to his own instant ruin, I am satisfied that he would do justice and fulfil his duty under any possible difficulties, and through the very strongest temptations to do otherwise. For honour the most delicate, for integrity the firmest, and for generosity within the limits of prudence, Southey cannot well have a superior; and, in the lesser moralities—those which govern the daily habits, and transpire through the manners—he is certainly a better man—that is (with reference to the minor principle concerned), a more amiable man—than Wordsworth. He is less capable, for instance, of usurping an undue share of the conversation; he is more uniformly disposed to be charitable in his transient colloquial judgments upon doubtful actions of his neighbours; more gentle and winning in his condescensions to inferior knowledge or powers of mind; more willing to suppose it possible that he himself may have fallen into an error; more tolerant of avowed indifference towards his own writings (though, by the way, I shall have something to offer in justification of Wordsworth, upon this charge); and, finally, if the reader will pardon a violent instance of anti-climax, much more ready to volunteer his assistance in carrying a lady's reticule or parasol.

As a more amiable man (taking that word partly in the French sense, partly also in the loftier English sense), it might be imagined that Southey would be a more eligible companion than Wordsworth. But this is not so; and chiefly for three reasons which more than counterbalance Southey's greater amiability: first, because the natural reserve of Southey, which I have mentioned before, makes it peculiarly difficult to place yourself on terms of intimacy with him; secondly, because the range of his conversation is more limited than that of Wordsworth—dealing less with life and the interests of life—more exclusively with books; thirdly, because the style of his conversation is less flowing and diffusive—less expansive—more apt to clothe itself in a keen, sparkling, aphoristic form—consequently much sooner and more frequently coming to an abrupt close. A sententious, epigrammatic form of delivering opinions has a certain effect of clenching a subject, which makes it difficult to pursue it without a corresponding smartness of expression, and something of the same antithetic point and equilibration of clauses. Not that the reader is to suppose in Southey a showy master of rhetoric and colloquial sword-play, seeking to strike and to dazzle by his brilliant hits or adroit evasions. The very opposite is the truth. He seeks, indeed, to be effective, not for the sake of display, but as the readiest means of retreating from display, and the necessity for display: feeling that his station in literature and his laurelled honours make him a mark for the curiosity and interest of the company—that a standing appeal is constantly turning to him for his opinion—a latent call always going on for his voice on the question of the moment—he is anxious to comply with this requisition at as slight a cost as may be of thought and time. His heart is continually reverting to his wife, viz. his library; and, that he may waste as little effort as possible upon his conversational exercises—that the little he wishes to say may appear pregnant with much meaning—he finds it advantageous, and, moreover, the style of his mind naturally prompts him, to adopt a trenchant, pungent, aculeated form of terse, glittering, stenographic sentences—sayings which have the air of laying down the law without any locus penitentiæ or privilege of appeal, but are not meant to do so; in short, aiming at brevity for the company as well as for himself, by cutting off all opening for discussion and desultory talk through the sudden winding up that belongs to a sententious aphorism. The hearer feels that "the record is closed"; and he has a sense of this result as having been accomplished by something like an oracular laying down of the law ex cathedra: but this is an indirect collateral impression from Southey's manner, and far from the one he meditates or wishes. An oracular manner he does certainly affect in certain dilemmas of a languishing or loitering conversation; not the peremptoriness, meantime, not the imperiousness of the oracle is what he seeks for, but its brevity, its dispatch, its conclusiveness.

Finally, as a fourth reason why Southey is less fitted for a genial companion than Wordsworth, his spirits have been, of late years, in a lower key than those of the latter. The tone of Southey's animal spirits was never at any time raised beyond the standard of an ordinary sympathy; there was in him no tumult, no agitation of passion; his organic and constitutional sensibilities were healthy, sound, perhaps strong—but not profound, not excessive. Cheerful he was, and animated at all times; but he levied no tributes on the spirits or the feelings beyond what all people could furnish. One reason why his bodily temperament never, like that of Wordsworth, threw him into a state of tumultuous excitement which required intense and elaborate conversation to work off the excessive fervour, was, that, over and above his far less fervid constitution of mind and body, Southey rarely took any exercise; he led a life as sedentary, except for the occasional excursions in summer (extorted from his sense of kindness and hospitality), as that of a city tailor. And it was surprising to many people, who did not know by experience the prodigious effect upon the mere bodily health of regular and congenial mental labour, that Southey should be able to maintain health so regular, and cheerfulness so uniformly serene. Cheerful, however, he was, in those early years of my acquaintance with him; but it was manifest to a thoughtful observer that his golden equanimity was bound up in a threefold chain,—in a conscience clear of all offence, in the recurring enjoyments from his honourable industry, and in the gratification of his parental affections. If any one cord should give way, there (it seemed) would be an end to Southey's tranquillity. He had a son at that time, Herbert[135] Southey, a child in petticoats when I first knew him, very interesting even then, but annually putting forth fresh blossoms of unusual promise, that made even indifferent people fear for the safety of one so finely organized, so delicate in his sensibilities, and so prematurely accomplished. As to his father, it became evident that he lived almost in the light of young Herbert's smiles, and that the very pulses of his heart played in unison to the sound of his son's laughter. There was in his manner towards this child, and towards this only, something that marked an excess of delirious doating, perfectly unlike the ordinary chastened movements of Southey's affections; and something also which indicated a vague fear about him; a premature unhappiness, as if already the inaudible tread of calamity could be perceived, as if already he had lost him; which, for the latter years of the boy's life, seemed to poison the blessing of his presence.

A stronger evidence I cannot give of Southey's trembling apprehensiveness about this child than that the only rude thing I ever knew him to do, the only discourteous thing, was done on his account. A party of us, chiefly composed of Southey's family and his visitors, were in a sailboat upon the lake. Herbert was one of this party; and at that time not above five or six years old. In landing upon one of the islands, most of the gentlemen were occupied in assisting the ladies over the thwarts of the boat; and one gentleman, merely a stranger, observing this, good-naturedly took up Herbert in his arms, and was stepping with him most carefully from thwart to thwart, when Southey, in a perfect frenzy of anxiety for his boy, his "moon" as he used to call him (I suppose from some pun of his own, or some mistake of the child's upon the equivocal word sun), rushed forward, and tore him out of the arms of the stranger without one word of apology; nor, in fact, under the engrossing panic of the moment, lest an unsteady movement along with the rocking and undulating of the boat should throw his little boy overboard into the somewhat stormy waters of the lake, did Southey become aware of his own exceedingly discourteous action: fear for his boy quelled his very power of perception. That the stranger, on reflection, understood; a race of emotions travelled over his countenance. I saw the whole, a silent observer from the shore. First a hasty blush of resentment mingled with astonishment: then a good-natured smile of indulgence to the naïveté of the paternal feeling as displaying itself in the act, and the accompanying gestures of frenzied impatience; finally, a considerate, grave expression of acquiescence in the whole act; but with a pitying look towards father and son, as too probably destined under such agony of affection to trials perhaps insupportable. If I interpreted aright the stranger's feelings, he did not read their destinies amiss. Herbert became, with his growing years, a child of more and more hope; but, therefore, the object of more and more fearful solicitude. He read, and read; and he became at last

"A very learned youth"—

to borrow a line from his uncle's beautiful poem on the wild boy who fell into a heresy whilst living under the patronage of a Spanish grandee, and finally escaped from a probable martyrdom by sailing up a great American river, wide as any sea, after which he was never heard of again. The learned youth of the river Greta had an earlier and more sorrowful close to his career. Possibly from want of exercise, combined with inordinate exercise of the cerebral organs, a disease gradually developed itself in the heart. It was not a mere disorder in the functions, it was a disease in the structure of the organ, and admitted of no permanent relief, consequently of no final hope. He died[136]; and with him died for ever the golden hopes, the radiant felicity, and the internal serenity, of the unhappy father. It was from Southey himself, speaking without external signs of agitation, calmly, dispassionately, almost coldly, but with the coldness of a settled despondency, that I heard, whilst accompanying him through Grasmere on his road homewards to Keswick from some visit he had been paying to Wordsworth at Rydal Mount, his settled feelings and convictions as connected with that loss. For him, in this world, he said, happiness there could be none; for his tenderest affections, the very deepest by many degrees which he had ever known, were now buried in the grave with his youthful and too brilliant Herbert!