Born in Hampshire, England, in 1787. She was the daughter of a retired officer, and both of her parents died when she was very young. She remained in the retirement at the country home which had been her father’s, and published, “Ellen Fitz-Arthur,” a poem, 1820; “The Widow’s Tale, and other Poems,” 1822; “Solitary Hours, Prose and Verse,” 1826; and “Chapters on Churchyards,” a series of tales and sketches originally contributed to “Blackwood,” 1829. On June 5th, 1839, she married Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate (1774–1843), whose first wife had died two years before. Miss Bowles and he had long been warm personal friends, and had talked of writing books together. After his death she published two or three fragmentary volumes of poetry with both his initials and her own on the title page. She died in 1854.
Personal
Neither in prose nor in verse is Caroline Southey strong enough to maintain a high place. She will probably be best remembered by her connection with Southey and by her share in the volume of his correspondence edited by Professor Dowden. His part is the more important, but Caroline’s letters prove that she possessed more liveliness and satiric talent than might have been expected from the authoress of “Chapters on Churchyards.” She was diminutive, and had suffered from smallpox; the portrait prefixed to Professor Dowden’s edition of her correspondence is, however, by no means unprepossessing.
General
Her productions are distinguished for correctness, simplicity and tenderness. She has little imagination, but she has a kindly disposition and an unusual depth of sentiment. Occasionally she is playful, but the genius of her poetry is religious. The range of her subjects is limited, but her writings evince a nice observation, a sympathy with the suffering, and a pious trustfulness.
It would be difficult, I think, to find among our Female Poets one who in vigour of mind, intensity of feeling, and gracefulness of expression, excels Mrs. Southey. Her poems have a simplicity, a naturalness, which is as pleasing as it is rare. Her verses are the very perfection of direct and inartificial thought. In terse force of style I do not know her superior: whilst at the same time she has the quickness of vision and the sensitiveness of sympathy which characterise her sex.
No man could have written such poetry—at least no man has ever yet done so: it breathes of “a purer ether, a diviner air” than that respired by the soi-disant lords of the creation; and in its freedom from all moral blemish and blot—from all harshness and austerity of sentiment—from all the polluting taints which are apt to cleave to the human thought, and its expansive sympathy with all that is holy, just, and of good report—it elevates the heart even more than it delights the fancy. We doubt if the English language possess anything more profoundly pathetic than Mrs. Southey’s four tales, “The Young Grey Head,” “The Murder Glen,” “Walter and William,” and “The Evening Walk;” and I envy not the heart-construction of that family group, of which the father could read these compositions aloud to his children either himself with an unfaltering voice, or without exciting their tears.
No English poetess has written sweeter, or has touched more tenderly the chords of the heart, or has gone down deeper into its well-springs, than Caroline Anne, Bowles now Mrs. Southey.
It is sufficiently astonishing to most of us, in this generation, that Robert Southey’s contemporaries took him for a great poet; but it is still more astonishing that they took Miss Bowles, who became his second wife, for a great poetess. “Delta” represented the opinions of many when he declared that she equalled Mrs. Hemans; and the Quarterly Review calls her “the Cowper of Poetesses.” She was no poetess at all. Certainly it cannot be said of her, as it was said of Shadwell, that she “never deviates into sense.” Her verse is full of sense, but it never deviates into poetry.
She was the author of various stories, poems, and essays—the latter of which, in the form of series of “Chapters on Churchyards,” published in Blackwood’s Magazine, are almost the only relics of her that have a faint survival.
Mrs. Southey’s verse had a greater charm for her own generation than it can ever have again. There is a natural simplicity about it which gives it a certain affinity with the so-called “Lake school,” and which was much newer in her day than it is in ours. And yet, after the lapse of so many years, like flowers that have been preserved, her work still emits a sweet mild fragrance, and recalls a tender, sympathetic personalty. One can scarcely read her general poems without feeling that they came from a true, loving heart, nor peruse the poems which with an almost morbid recurrence she wrote upon the subject of death, without feeling that she had a true sense of the sublime. Faulty in form, she possessed a spontaneity which some masters of form never show, besides in some degree that magic touch which invests a subject with the nameless environment which for want of a better term we call atmosphere.
The decent worth of Caroline Bowles.
