The record of his early life is given with much amusing details. His parents were rather illiterate, and he depended on chance to gratify his thirst for books, with nobody to select what were proper to his age. He read Beaumont and Fletcher through before he was eight years old,—a most curious book for a child, when we consider the obscenity, licentiousness, and slang which mingle with the romantic beauty of those dramatists. He says they did him no harm, for the reason that he was so young. In Mrs. Rowe’s Letters he read her version of the stories of Olendo and Sophronia, and the Enchanted Forest, from Tasso, and despaired at the time of ever reading more of the poem until he was man, “from a whimsical notion that, as the subject related to Jerusalem, the original must be in Hebrew;” and there was not learning enough in his father’s house to set him right on the point.
Perhaps the most interesting peculiarity of books like the present, is their expression of the private opinions which their subjects entertained of contemporary men and events. This certainly is the raciest element in the Correspondence of Southey, and his letters are next in attractiveness to a cosy chat with himself. Of Bentham, he remarks—“It has pleased the metaphysico-critico-politico-patriotico-phoolo-philosopher Jeremy Bentham, to designate me, in one of his opaque works, by the appellation of St. Southey, for which I humbly thank his Jeremy Benthamship, and have in part requited him.” His hatred of Jeffrey, and contempt of Reviews, provoke many a sardonic remark, replete with his peculiar humor. “Turner,” he writes to Rickman, “complained heavily of Scotch criticism, which he seems to feel too much. Such things only provoke me to interject Fool! and Booby! seasoned with the participle damnatory; but as for being vexed at a review—I should as soon be fevered by a flea-bite! . . . I look upon the invention of reviews to be the worst injury which literature has received since its revival.” Of Coleridge he says—“His mind is in a perfect St. Vitus’s dance—eternal activity without action.” Jeffrey, according to Southey, is a bad politician, a worse moralist, and a critic, in matters of taste, equally incompetent and unjust. It is unfortunate that his criticism on himself and on others, in these letters, is not of a kind to entitle him to condemn the editor of the Edinburgh Review. “Cowper,” he asserts, “owed his popularity to his piety, not to his poetry, and that piety was craziness.” His opinion was altered, of course, when he afterward edited an edition of Cowper’s works. Of Walter Savage Lander’s poem of Gebir, he says—“I look upon Gebir, as I do upon Dante’s long poem in the Italian, not as a good poem, but as containing the finest poetry in the language.” His power of appreciating Wordsworth may be estimated by his remark, in a letter to Scott, on the “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Childhood.” “The Ode on Pre-existence,” he says, “is a dark subject darkly handled. Coleridge is the only man who could make such a subject luminous. The Leech Gatherer is one of my favorites.” We might quote many other critical judgments, “equally incompetent and unjust,” but if the last does not satisfy the reader, it is impossible to quote any thing that will.
The following passage, from a letter written in 1812, gives so vivid an impression of Shelley in his enthusiastic youth, that we cannot refrain from extracting it. The style is very characteristic of Southey’s manner throughout the letters.
“Here is a man in Keswick, who acts upon me as my own ghost would do. He is just what I was in 1794. His name is Shelley, son to the member for Shoreham, with £6000 a year entailed upon him, and as much more in his father’s power to cut off. Beginning with romances of ghosts and murder, and with poetry at Eton, he passed, at Oxford, into metaphysics; printed half-a-dozen pages, which he entitled “The Necessity of Atheism;” sent one anonymously to Coplestone, in expectation, I suppose, of converting him; was expelled in consequence; married a girl of seventeen, after being turned out of doors by his father; and here they both are, in lodgings, living upon £200 a year, which her father allows them. He is come to the fittest physician in the world. At present he has got to the Pantheistic stage of philosophy, and, in the course of a week, I expect he will be a Berkleyan, for I have put him upon a course of Berkley. It has surprised him a good deal to meet, for the first time in his life, a man who perfectly understands him, and does him full justice. I tell him that all the difference between us is that he is nineteen and I am thirty-seven; and I dare say it will not be very long before I shall succeed in convincing him that he may be a true philosopher, and do a great deal of good with £6000 a year; the thought of which troubles him a great deal more at present than ever the want of sixpence (for I have known such a want) did me. God help us! the world wants mending, though he did not set about it exactly in the right way.”
This Life of Southey promises to be an important addition to the biographical treasures of English literature, and we look with great expectation for the remaining volumes, which will record his quarrels with Byron, his coldness to Coleridge, and the publication of his most important works.
Historic View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic Nations: with a Sketch of their Popular Poetry. By Taloi. With a Preface by Edward Robinson, D. D., LL.D. 1 vol. 12mo.
This work is a real addition to English literature, containing a succinct view of a subject which has heretofore been treated by those English scholars, who have treated of it at all, in a fragmentary and unsatisfactory manner. The Slavic nations contain a population of seventy millions, and it is strange that a work like the present has not been produced before, the subject being rich in matter both to interest and instruct the better class of readers.
“Taloi,” as we presume is well known, is the name assumed by Mrs. Robinson, the learned wife of the learned gentleman who prefaces the present history. Few living women can be said to excel her in the rare combination of erudition with heartiness. This volume owes much of its attractiveness to the feminine qualities which sometimes guide and sometimes relieve her erudite researches. Her selection of anecdotes, illustrative of national character, is very happy. In speaking of the submission with which the Slavic Nations received Christianity, the people readily following their superiors, she remarks, that “Vladimir the Great, to whom the Gospel and the Koran were offered at the same time, was long undecided which to choose; and was at last induced to embrace the former, because ‘his Russians could not live without the pleasure of drinking.’”
There are many poetical translations in the volume of much excellence, some of them having such a marked peculiarity that, without knowing the originals, a critic might pronounce them to be true versions. Two or three poems, relating to the desolate condition of motherless orphans, are introduced by a reference to a Danish ballad, which we trust that Longfellow will search after and translate. “The Danes,” says Taloi, “have a beautiful ballad, in which the ghost of a mother is roused by the wailings and sufferings of her deserted offspring, to break with supernatural power the gravestone, and to re-enter, in the stillness of the night, the neglected nursery, in order to cheer, to nurse, to comb and wash the dear little ones whom God once entrusted to her care.” The following translation of a ballad, written in the Upper Lusatian language, we extract: