famous one at his tailor’s for the plum-colored coat made in elaborate fashion. “Was ever poet so trusted before?” exclaimed his friend Johnson. Among the friends who mourned his premature death (he was only forty-five) were some poor wretches whom out of his own poverty he had helped and befriended.
The year Goldsmith died, 1774, Robert Southey was born, a man whose life was in all respects different—shielded, domestic, happy, and uneventful. “I have lived in the sunshine,” he says of himself. He worked hard and was thoroughly happy, singularly unambitious, but imaginative and enthusiastic. He was born at Bristol, and his early school-life and holidays with an eccentric aunt were among his most cheerful reminiscences. This old lady, Miss Tyler, was one of those excruciatingly neat housekeepers who make every one about them uncomfortable. “I have seen her,” writes her nephew, “order the teakettle to be emptied and refilled because some one had passed across the hearth while it was on the fire preparing for her breakfast. She had a cup once buried for six weeks to purify it from the lips of one she accounted unclean. All who were not her favorites were included in that class. A chair in which an unclean person had sat was put out in the garden to be aired; and I never saw her more annoyed than on one occasion when a man who called on business seated himself in her own chair; how the cushion was ever again to be rendered fit for her use she knew not.” Dust was of course her pet aversion, and she took more precautions against it “than would have been needful against the plague in an infected city.” Southey was adoringly fond of his mother, from
whom he inherited “that alertness of mind and quickness of apprehension without which it would have been impossible for me to have undertaken half of what I have performed. God never blessed a human creature with a more cheerful disposition, a more generous spirit, a sweeter temper, or a tenderer heart.” In all this the happy poet was her counterpart. He went to Westminster School, then to Balliol College, Oxford, but distinguished himself rather by feats of physical prowess than by hard study. He learned to row and swim, and lived a healthy out-door life, as he had done in his childhood when he roamed the country round Bristol with Shad, his aunt’s servant-boy. Vice and dissipation had no attractions for him, though there were but too many opportunities for self-indulgence at the university. At nineteen he wrote his first epic poem, “Joan of Arc.” He was an enthusiastic republican, and one of the most eager supporters of the Pantisocracy scheme—a social Utopia, to be realized by a handful of young emigrants, who were to choose some tract of virgin soil in America, and support themselves by manual labor, while their wives would undertake all domestic duties. Their earnings were to go to a common fund, and their leisure hours be spent in intellectual exercises. Of course the pleasant dream faded away, and the group of destined companions dispersed; but three of the enthusiasts married three sisters at Bath, and some bond of the old time was kept up for many years by this connection. Southey’s marriage was not made public till the return of the bridegroom from Portugal, where he had promised to accompany his uncle, on the very day his marriage took place. His bride kept her maiden
name and wore her wedding-ring hung by a ribbon round her neck until her husband came back, when she went with him to London, where they bravely lived and struggled on a narrow and uncertain income. He too, like many other poets, had refused, from conscientious motives, the prospect of a comfortable provision in the National Church, and preferred to live by his own exertions. The consequence was that he too often lived from hand to mouth; yet his home circumstances were so bright that he never seems to have been in the same gloomy “circle” of the literary “Inferno” as most of his brothers. When he was thirty he settled at Greta Hall, Keswick, in the Lake country, among the mountains, and there, incessantly at work with his pen, he refused many a lucrative offer which would have drawn him from nature to the distractions of London life. He was as fond a father as he had been a son, romped and played with his children, wrote nonsense verses for them, like poor Thackeray, and yet never neglected their more serious education. “Every house,” he used to say, “should have in it a baby of six months and a kitten rising six weeks.” Once, when invited to London by some great man, he writes: “Oh! dear, oh! dear, there’s such a comfort in one’s old coat and old shoes, one’s own chair and own fireside, one’s own writing-desk and own library; with a little girl climbing up to my neck and saying, ‘Don’t go to London, papa; you must stay with Edith’; and a little boy whom I have taught to speak the language of cats, dogs, cuckoos, jackasses, etc., before he can articulate a word of his own—there is such a comfort in all these things that transportation to London seems a heavier punishment than
any sins of mine deserve.” During an absence in Edinburgh he writes to his wife: “What I have now to say to you is that, having been eight days from home, with as little discomfort as a man can reasonably expect, I have yet felt so little comfortable, so great a sense of solitariness, and so many homeward yearnings, that certainly I will not go to Lisbon without you—a resolution which, if your feelings be at all like mine, will not displease you.” His happy life was as regular as clock-work: drudging, money-making work, reading, siesta, poetry, meals, long rambles, each had its appointed time, and his days were as full as they were happy. The domestic propensities which worldly men called his ruin and the marrers of his prospects of rank and wealth, were in reality what inspired his poetry, and thus made him immortal. His poetry belongs to our century, yet such a stride have we made—we will not say forward in the sense of greater excellence, but in that of utter difference—since his time that we venture to include him in this sketch, reckoning by his birth and early struggles, which after all made the man, and thus moulded the poet.
Melancholy, unhappy, restless Cowper was, with all the love and care he elicited from good and devoted women, a great contrast to Southey. He was terribly sensitive, clinging, loving, but somewhat weak. The picture of the boy of six years old playing with his young mother’s dress, pricking the pattern of her gown into paper with a pin, as he describes himself in the pathetic poem on the receipt of his mother’s picture, is a touching and suggestive one; for his mother died when he was a child, and he never forgot her for the fifty remaining years of
his lonely life. This portrait was sent to him by a cousin in his old age, and he writes thus in answer to the gift: “Every creature that bears any affinity to my mother is dear to me, and you, the daughter of her brother, are but one remove distant from her.… I kissed it [the picture] and hung it where it is the last object that I see at night, and of course the first on which I open my eyes in the morning.… I remember a multitude of the maternal tendernesses which I received from her, and which have endeared her memory to me beyond expression.” Cowper’s house at Olney was not a cheerful one, and his frequent fits of madness, or monomania, lasted sometimes for months, and even years. They took the shape of religious despondency about his soul; he was “only in despair,” he said, and often attempted to kill himself. His second mother, who devoted her life to him, the widow of a clergyman, Mrs. Unwin, saved his life many times over; he could not bear any other companion, yet it was part of his delusion that she disliked him. Every one has heard of his fondness for his hares, the first of which came to him as a chance gift, to save the creature from being killed by a negligent little boy; so at one time he had a large “happy family” gathered around him, whose hutches, cages, and boxes he amused himself by making. Some of these contrivances were novel and ingenious. Three hares, five rabbits, two guinea-pigs, a magpie, a starling, a jay, two gold-finches, two canaries, two dogs, a squirrel, and a number of pigeons gave him plenty to do, besides his garden, of which he was equally fond. When he had succeeded in himself making two glass frames for his pines, he playfully wrote:
“A Chinese of ten times my fortune would avail himself of such an opportunity without scruple; and why should not I, who want money as much as any mandarin in China?” Cowper’s friends all had something to do with his poetry. His poem “To Mary,” in which he notes the constant clicking of her knitting-needles, was a tribute to Mrs. Unwin, and many of his early verses were suggested by her; the “Task” and “John Gilpin’s Ride” (written, he says, in the saddest mood, and as a forced antidote to that sadness) were subjects given him by Lady Austen, a warm-hearted, impulsive woman; and his cousin, Lady Hesketh, and her sister Theodora, his only love, from whom he was parted in his first youth, and who remained single for his sake, inspired some of his tenderest and most delicate verses.
Lady Hesketh, writing to Theodora from Olney, gives the following sketch of their friend’s life in its more tranquil and happy aspect: “Our friend delights in a large table and a large chair. There are two of the latter comforts in the parlor. I am sorry to say that he and I always spread ourselves out on them, leaving poor Mrs. Unwin to find all the comfort she can in a small one, half as high again as ours and considerably harder than marble.… Her constant employment is knitting stockings, which she does
with the finest needles I ever saw, and very nice they are—the stockings, I mean. Our cousin has not for many years worn any others than those of her manufacture. She knits silk, cotton, and worsted. She sits knitting on one side of the table, in her spectacles, and he on the other side reading to her (when he is not employed in writing), in his. In winter his morning studies are always carried on in a room by himself; but as his evenings are spent in winter in transcribing, he usually, I find, does it vis-à-vis Mrs. Unwin. At this time of the year he always writes in the garden, in what he calls his boudoir. This is in the garden. It has a door and a window, just holds a small table with a desk and two chairs, but, though there are two chairs, and two persons might be contained therein, it would be with a degree of difficulty. For this cause, as I make a point of not disturbing a poet in his retreat, I go not there.”