It is exactly the same as to the country in which he lived. He seemed to live there as a stranger and a sojourner. That he loved the lakes and mountains around, there can be no question; but has he linked his poetry with them? Has he, like Wordsworth, woven his verse into almost every crevice of every rock? Cast the spell of his enchantment upon every stream? Made the hills, the waters, the hamlets, and the people, part and parcel of his life and his fame? We seek in vain for any such amalgamation. With the exception of the cataract of Lodore, there is scarcely a line of his poetry which localizes itself in the fairy region where he lived forty years. When Wordsworth is gone, he will leave on the mountains, and in all the vales of Cumberland, an everlasting people of his creation. The Wanderer, and the Clergyman of the Excursion, Michael, and Matthew, and the Wagoner, and Peter Bell, Ruth, and many a picturesque vagrant will linger there forever. The Shepherd Lord will haunt his ancient hills and castles, and the White Doe will still cross Rylston fells. A thousand associations will start up in the mind of many a future generation, as they hear the names of Helvellyn, Blencathra, or Langdale Pikes. But when you seek for evidences of the poetic existence of Southey in Cumberland, you are carried at once to Greta-hall at Keswick, and there you remain. I suppose the phrenologists would say it was owing to his idiosyncrasy—that he had much imitativeness, but very little locality. It is most singular, that look over the contents of his voluminous poems, and you find them connected with almost every region of the world, and every quarter of these kingdoms, except with the neighborhood of his abode. He would seem like a man flying from the face of the world, and brushing out all traces of his retreat as he goes. In Spain, France, America, India, Arabia, Africa, the West Indies, in Ireland, Wales, England, and Scotland, you perceive his poetical habitations and resting-places; but not in Cumberland. He has commemorated Pultowa, Jerusalem, Alentejo, Oxford, Blenheim, Dreux, Moscow, the Rhine. He has epitaphs and inscriptions for numbers of places in England, Spain, and Portugal. In his Madoc, Wales; in his Roderick, Spain; in his Joan of Arc, France, find abundance of their localities celebrated. In his Pilgrimage to Waterloo, Flanders has its commemorations; but Cumberland—no! You would think it was some district not glorious with mountain, lake, and legend, but some fenny flat on which a poetic spirit could not dwell.
Almost the only clews that we get at are to be found in the Colloquies. Here we learn that the poet and his family did sometimes walk to Skiddaw Dod, Causey Pike, and Watenlath. At page 119 of vol. i., where these names occur, we find the poet proposing an excursion to Walla Crag, on the waters of the Derwentwater. "I, who perhaps would more willingly have sat at home, was yet in a mood to suffer violence, and making a sort of compromise between their exuberant activity and my own inclination for the chair and the fireside, fixed on Walla Crag." Beside this mention, you have in Colloquy XII., pages 59 to 69, an introduction to a long history of the Clifford family, in which you are introduced to Threlkeld farm and village. This peep into the mountains makes you wonder that Southey did not give you more of them; but no, that is all. It is evident that his heart was, as he hinted just above, "at home in the chair by the fireside." It was in his library that he really lived, and there is little question that when his children did get him out on the plea that it was necessary for his health, his mind was gone off with some Thalaba or Madoc or other, or with that other favorite hero of his, whose "walk," and whose exploits with old women, he has described with a gusto that might have fitly fixed on him the appellation he gave to Lord Byron—the head of the Satanic school.
To Keswick we must then betake ourselves as the sole haunt of Robert Southey. My visit there in the summer of 1845 was marked by a circumstance which may show how well the fame of Dr. Southey, the laureate of Church and State, and the bard who sung the triumphs of legitimacy on the occasion of the allied sovereigns coming to England in 1814, is spread among the nations which are the strictest maintainers of his favorite doctrines; a fettered press, a law church, and a government maintained by such statesmen as Castlereagh and Metternich. I was traveling at that time with four of the subjects of these allied sovereigns, whom our laureate had so highly lauded; a Russian, a Cossack, an Austrian, and a Bohemian; the Cossack no other than the nephew of the Hetman Platoff, and the Bohemian, Count Wratislaw, the present representative of that very ancient family of which the queen of our Richard II., "the good Queen Anne," who sent out Wickliffe's Bible to Huss, and was thus the mother of the Reformation on the Continent; and, singularly also, still closely connected with our royal family, his mother being sister to the Princess of Leiningen, wife to the half-brother of Queen Victoria. Austrian and Russian nobles are not famous for great reading, but every one of these were as familiar with Dr. Southey's name as most people the world over are with those of Scott and Byron. They not only went over the laureate's house with the greatest interest, but carried away sprigs of evergreen to preserve as memorials.
Southey's house, which lies at a little distance from the town of Keswick, on the way to Bassenthwaite water, is a plain stuccoed tenement, looking as you approach it almost like a chapel, from the apparent absence of chimneys. Standing upon the bridge over the Greta which crosses the high-road here, the view all round of the mountains, those which lie at the back of Southey's house, Skiddaw being the chief, and those which lie in front, girdling the lake of Derwentwater, is grand and complete. From this bridge the house lies at the distance of a croft, or of three or four hundred yards, on an agreeable swell. In front, that is, between you and the house, ascends toward it a set of homelike crofts, with their cut hedges and a few scattered trees. When Southey went there, and I suppose for twenty years after, these were occupied as a nursery ground, and injured the effect of the immediate environs of the house extremely. Nothing now can be more green and agreeable. On the brow of the hill, if it can be called so, stand two stuccoed houses; the one nearest to the town, and the largest, being Southey's. Both are well flanked by pleasant trees, and partly hidden by them, that of Southey being most so. The smaller house has the air of a good neighbor of lesser importance, who is proud of being a neighbor. It is at present occupied by a Miss Denton, daughter of the former vicar of Crosthwaite, the place just below on the Bassenthwaite road, and where Southey lies buried.
The situation of Southey's house, taking all into consideration, is exceeded by few in England. It is agreeably distant from the road and the little town, and stands in a fine, open valley, surrounded by hills of the noblest and most diversified character. From your stand on Greta bridge, looking over the house, your eye falls on the group of mountains behind it. The lofty hill of Latrig lifts its steep, green back with its larch plantations clothing one edge, and scattered in groups over the other. Stretching away to the left, rises the still loftier range and giant masses of Skiddaw, with its intervening dells and ravines, and summits often lost in their canopy of shadowy clouds. Between the feet of Skiddaw and Greta bridge, lie pleasant knolls and fields with scattered villas and cottages, and Crosthwaite Church. On your right hand is the town, and behind it green swelling fields again, and the more distant inclosing chain of hills.
If you then turn your back on the house, and view the scene which is presented from the house, you find yourself in the presence of the river, hurrying away toward the assemblage of beautifully varied mountains, which encompass magnificently the lake of Derwentwater.
The vicinity to the lake itself would make this spot as a residence most attractive. I think I like Derwentwater more than any other of the lakes. The mountains all round are so bold and so diversified in form. You see them showing themselves one behind another, many tending to the pyramidal form, and their hues as varied as their shapes. Some are of that peculiar tawny, or lion color, which is so singular in its effect in the Scotch mountains of the south; others so softly and smoothly green; others so black and desolate. Some are so beautifully wooded, others so bare. When you look onward to the end of the lake, the group of mountains and crags there, at the entrance of Borrowdale, is one of the most beautiful and pictorial things imaginable. If any artist would choose a scene for the entrance into fairy land, let him take that. When, again, you turn and look over the town, there soars aloft Skiddaw in his giant grandeur, with all his slopes, ridges, dints, ravines, and summits clear in the blue sky, or hung with the cloud-curtains of heaven, full of magnificent mystery. There is a perfect pyramid, broad and massy as those of Egypt, standing solemnly in one of its ascending vales, called Carrsledrum. Then, the beautifully wooded islands of Derwentwater, eight in number, and the fine masses of wood that stretch away between the feet of the hills and the lake, with here and there a villa lighting up the scene, make it perfect. In all the changes of weather, the changes of aspect must be full of new beauty; but, in bright and genial summer weather, how enchanting must it be! As it was at our visit, the deep-black, yet transparent shadow that lay on some of the huge piles of mountain, and the soft light that lay on others, were indescribably noble and poetical, and the strangers exclaimed continually,—"Prächtig!" "Wunderschön!" and "Très beau!"
When we ascend to the house, it is through a narrow sort of croft or a wide shrubbery, which you will. The carriage-road goes another way, and here you have only a single footpath, and on your right hand a grassy plot scattered with a few flower-beds, and trees and shrubs, which brings you, by a considerable ascent, to the front of the house, which is screened almost wholly from view by tall trees, among which some are fine maples and red beeches. Here, on the left hand, a little side gate leads to Miss Denton's house, and on the other stretches out the lawn, screened by hedges of laurel and other evergreens. Behind this little lawn, on the right hand of the house, lie one or two kitchen gardens, and passing through these, you come to a wood descending toward the river, which you again find here sweeping around the house. Down this wood or copse, which is half-orchard, and half of forest trees, you see traces of winding footpaths, but all now grown over with grass. The house is deserted; the spirits which animated the scene are fled, some one way, and some another; and there is already a wildness and a desolation about it. The Greta, rushing over its weir beneath this wood, moans in melancholy sympathy with the rest of the scene. You see that great pleasure has sometime been taken in this spot, in these gardens, in this shadowy and steeply descending wood; and the river that runs on beneath, and the melancholy feeling of the dreamlike nature and vanity of human things, its fame and happiness included, seizes irresistibly upon you. A little footpath which runs along the Greta side toward the town deepens this feeling. Through the trees, and behind the river, lie deep and grassy meadows with masses of woodland, having a very Cuyp or Paul Potter look; and, between the higher branches of the trees you see the huge green bulk of Skiddaw, soaring up with fine and almost startling effect. You may imagine Southey walking to and fro along the footpath under the trees, in the fields leading to the town, by another route, and thinking over his topics, while he took the air, and had in view a scene of mountain magnificence, of the effect of which the poet was fully conscious. "The height and extent of the surrounding objects seem to produce a correspondent expansion and elevation of mind, and the silence and solitude contribute to this emotion. You feel as if in another region, almost in another world."[4] Here, too, you may imagine Coleridge lying and dreaming under the trees of the wood within sound of the river. He was here, at one time, a great while.
To return to the house, however. It is a capacious house enough, but not apparently very well built. The floors of the upper rooms shake under your tread; and I have heard, that when Southey had these rooms crowded and piled with books, there was a fear of their coming down. The house is one of those square houses of which you may count the rooms without going into them, but at each end is a circular projection, making each a snug sort of ladies' room. The room on the right hand as we entered, was said to be the sitting-room, and that on the left, the library, while the room over it was Southey's writing-room; and most of these rooms, as well as the entrance-hall, were all crowded with books. We were told that, after several days' sale at home, where some books as well as the furniture were sold, fourteen tuns of books and similar articles were sent off for sale in London.
If Southey has not told us much about his haunts in the mountains, he has, however, particularly described that where his heart lay—his library. To this he has given a whole chapter in his Colloquies; and in this volume we must, as a matter of course, give a few extracts, for it is almost the only haunt of Southey, of which he has left us any glimpse in his writings.