1774—Born, August 12th, in Bristol. 1788—A scholar at Westminster. 1792—Expelled from Westminster School, for printing an article upon flogging. 1793—Enters Oxford University. 1794—Studies medicine for a short time. Publishes a volume of poems, the joint work of himself and Robert Lovell. Leaves Oxford. Plans a Pantisocracy, with Coleridge and others. 1795—Marries Miss Edith Fricker, privately. Goes to Lisbon with his uncle. Publishes “Joan of Arc.” 1796—Returns to England, and lives with his wife in Bristol. 1797—Resides in London, in order to study law. 1800—Goes to Lisbon with his wife. 1801—Returns to England. Publishes “Thalaba.” Becomes private secretary to the Irish Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer. 1802—Resigns his position as Secretary. Lives at Bristol with his wife. 1803—Takes his wife to Greta Hall, at Keswick. 1805—Publishes “Madoc.” 1807—Receives a pension of two hundred pounds per annum. 1809—Contributes to the first numbers of “The Quarterly Review.” 1810—Publishes the “Curse of Kehama,” and the first volume of “The History of Brazil.” 1813—Becomes Poet Laureate. Publishes “The Life of Nelson.” 1814—Publishes “Roderick.” 1817—“Wat Tyler,” a revolutionary sketch, written in Southey’s youth, is published, without his consent. 1820—Publishes “The Life of Wesley.” 1824—Publishes “The Book of the Church.” 1826—Elected to Parliament, but declines to serve. 1829—Publishes “Colloquies.” 1834—Publishes “The Doctor.” 1835—Publishes “The Life of Cowper.” Declines a baronetcy, offered to him by Sir Robert Peel. Receives an addition of 300l. per annum to his pension. 1837—His wife dies. 1839—Marries Miss Catherine Bowles. 1843—Dies, March 21st.

Personal

  Literature is now Southey’s trade; he is a manufacturer, and his workshop is his study,—a very beautiful one certainly, but its beauty and the delightful environs, as well as his own celebrity, subject him to interruptions. His time is his wealth, and I shall therefore scrupulously abstain from stealing any portion of it.

	Bob Southey! You’re a poet—Poet-Laureate,
	And representative of all the race,
	Although ’t is true that you turn’d out a Tory at
	Last—yours has lately been a common case:
	And now, my Epic Renegade! what are ye at?
	With all the Lakers, in and out of place?

  He is certainly an extraordinary man, one of those whose character I find it difficult to comprehend, because I hardly know how such elements can be brought together, such rapidity of mind with such patient labour and wearisome exactness, so mild a disposition with so much nervous excitability, and a poetical talent so elevated with such an immense mass of minute, dull learning.

  His figure is rather tall and slim, but apparently muscular, and has altogether an air of gentility about it. He has nothing whatever about him of the stiffness or awkwardness of a great student; but, on the contrary, were he a mere ordinary person, I should describe him as a genteel-looking man, possessing much natural elegance, or even grace. But his head and countenance bespeak the poet. His hair is black, and bushy, and strong, and gives him a bold, free, and even dignified look; his face is sharp; his nose high; and his eyes, without having that piercing look which is often felt to be disagreeable, because too searching, in the eyes of men of genius, are, without any exception, the most acute and intelligent I ever beheld. Yet I believe he is near-sighted; and this seems to have given him a habit of elevating his face when he speaks, as if he were looking up, which brings all his features fully before you, and seemed to me to impart to his whole demeanour a singular charm of sincerity and independence. His voice seemed to me at first to be shrill and weak, and perhaps it is so, but there is in it a kind of musical wildness, which I could not help considering to be characteristic of the author of “Thalaba;” and when he chanced to recite a few lines of poetry it became quite empassioned.

  Sir,—You have done me an unfriendly office, without perhaps much considering what you were doing. You have given an ill name to my poor lucubrations. In a recent paper on Infidelity, you usher in a conditional commendation of them with an exception; which, preceding the encomium, and taking up nearly the same space with it, must impress your readers with the notion, that the objectionable parts in them are at least equal in quantity to the pardonable. The censure is in fact the criticism; the praise—a concession merely. Exceptions usually follow, to qualify praise or blame. But there stands your reproof, in the very front of your notice, in ugly characters, like some bugbear, to frighten all good Christians from purchasing. Through you I become an object of suspicion to preceptors of youth, and fathers of families. “A book which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it is original.” With no further explanation, what must your readers conjecture, but that my little volume is some vehicle for heresy or infidelity?… You have never ridiculed, I believe, what you thought to be religion, but you are always girding at what some pious, but perhaps mistaken folks, think to be so. For this reason, I am sorry to hear that you are engaged upon a life of George Fox…. You pick up pence by showing the hallowed bones, shrine, and crucifix; and you take money a second time by exposing the trick of them afterwards. You carry your verse to Castle Angelo for sale in a morning; and, swifter than a peddler can transmute his pack, you are at Canterbury with your prose ware before night.

  Mr. Southey, as we formerly remember to have seen him, had a hectic flush upon his cheek, a roving fire in his eye, a falcon glance, a look at once aspiring and dejected—it was the look that had been impressed upon his face by the events that marked the outset of his life, it was the dawn of Liberty that still tinged his cheek, a smile betwixt hope and sadness that still played upon his quivering lip…. Mr. Southey is not of the court, courtly. Every thing of him and about him is from the people. He is not classical, he is not legitimate. He is not a man cast in the mould of other men’s opinions: he is not shaped on any model: he bows to no authority: he yields only to his own wayward peculiarities. He is wild, irregular, singular, extreme. He is no formalist, not he! All is crude and chaotic, self-opinionated, vain. He wants proportion, keeping, system, standard rules. He is not teres et rotundus. Mr. Southey walks with his chin erect through the streets of London, and with an umbrella sticking out under his arm, in the finest weather. He has not sacrificed to the Graces, nor studied decorum. With him everything is projecting, starting from its place, an episode, a digression, a poetic license. He does not move in any given orbit, but like a falling star, shoots from his sphere. He is pragmatical, restless, unfixed, full of experiments, beginning everything a-new, wiser than his betters, judging for himself, dictating to others. He is decidedly revolutionary. He may have given up the reform of the State: but depend upon it, he has some other hobby of the same kind…. Mr. Southey’s conversation has a little resemblance to a common-place book; his habitual deportment to a piece of clock-work. He is not remarkable either as a reasoner or an observer: but he is quick, unaffected, replete with anecdotes, various and retentive in his reading, and exceedingly happy in his play upon words as most scholars are who give their minds this sportive turn. We have chiefly seen Mr. Southey in company where few people appear to advantage, we mean in that of Mr. Coleridge. He has not certainly the same range of speculation, nor the same flow of sounding words, but he makes up by the detail of knowledge, and by a scrupulous correctness of statement for what he wants in originality of thought, or impetuous declamation.

  He is in person above the middle size, but slender, with something of the stoop and listless air of an habitual student. A retiring forehead, shaded in part by thick curled hair, already gray; strongly marked arching eyebrows; uncommonly full, dark eyes, blue I incline to think; a thin but very prominent nose; a mouth large and eloquent, and a retreating but well-defined chin.

	Now hurried we home, and while taking our tea
	We thought—Mr. Southey at Church we might see!
	*        *        *        *        *
	Next morning, the church how we wished to be reaching!
	I’m afraid ’twas as much for the poet as preaching!
	*        *        *        *        *
	Howe’er I forgave,—’deed I scarcely did know it,—
	For really we were “cheek-by-jowl” with the poet!
	His hair was no colour at all by the way,
	But half of’t was black, slightly scattered with grey;
	His eyes were as black as a coal, but in turning
	They flashed,—ay, as much as that coal does in burning!
	His nose in the midst took a small outward bend,
	Rather hooked like an eagle’s, and sharp at the end;
	But his dark lightning-eye made him seem half-inspired,
	Or like his own Thalaba, vengefully fired.
	We looked, and we gazed, and we stared in his face;
	Marched out at a slow, stopping, lingering pace;
	And as towards Keswick delighted we walked,
	Of his face, and his form, and his features we talked.

  My first interview with Mr. Southey was at the Queen’s Head Inn, in Keswick, where I had arrived, wearied, one evening, on my way to Westmoreland; and not liking to intrude on his family circle that evening, I sent a note up to Greta Hall, requesting him to come down and see me. He came on the instant, and stayed with me about an hour and a half. But I was aggrieved as well as an astonished man, when I found that he refused all participation in my beverage of rum punch. For a poet to refuse his glass was to me a phenomenon; and I confess I doubted in my own mind, and doubt to this day, if perfect sobriety and transcendant poetical genius can exist together…. Before we had been ten minutes together my heart was knit to Southey, and every hour thereafter my esteem for him increased…. Southey certainly is as elegant a writer as any in the kingdom. But those who would love Southey as well as admire him, must see him, as I did, in the bosom, not only of one lovely family, but of three, all attached to him as a father, and all elegantly maintained and educated, it is generally said, by his indefatigable pen. The whole of Southey’s conversation and economy, both at home and afield, left an impression of veneration on my mind, which no future contingency shall ever either extinguish or injure. Both his figure and countenance are imposing, and deep thought is strongly marked in his dark eye; but there is a defect in his eyelids, for these he has no power of raising, so that when he looks up he turns up his face, being unable to raise his eyes; and when he looks towards the top of one of his romantic mountains, one would think he was looking at the zenith. This peculiarity is what will most strike every stranger in the appearance of the accomplished laureate. He does not at all see well at a distance, which made me several times disposed to get into a passion with him, because he did not admire the scenes which I was pointing out.

  There was … an habitual delicacy in his conversation, evidencing that cheerfulness and wit might exist without ribaldry, grossness, or profanation. He neither violated decorum himself, nor tolerated it in others. I have been present when a trespasser of the looser class has received a rebuke, I might say a castigation, well deserved, and not readily forgotten. His abhorrence also of injustice, or unworthy conduct, in its diversified shapes, had all the decision of a Roman censor; while this apparent austerity was associated, when in the society he liked, with so bland and playful a spirit, that it abolished all constraint, and rendered him one of the most agreeable, as well as the most intelligent of companions.

	Ye vales and hills whose beauty hither drew
	The poet’s steps, and fixed him here, on you
	His eyes have closed! And ye, loved books, no more
	Shall Southey feed upon your precious lore,
	To works that ne’er shall forfeit their renown,
	Adding immortal labours of his own—
	Whether he traced historic truth, with zeal
	For the State’s guidance, or the Church’s weal,
	Or Fancy, disciplined by studious art,
	Informed his pen, or wisdom of the heart,
	Or judgments sanctioned in the Patriot’s mind
	By reverence for the rights of all mankind.

  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.

  His domestic affections were warm; his domestic temper venerable and sweet; his self-denial and benevolence for the sake of the erring and the helpless were a life-long protest against the injurious laxity which enters into our estimate of the morals of genius. He was eminently happy in his life-long toils. He loved labour for itself, and he loved the subjects on which he toiled; and his conscience, nice as it was, could not but be satisfied and gratified at the spectacle of the aid and solace which, by his labours, he was able to give beyond his own family, to some who had no natural claim on him for support. In the spectacle of his social and domestic virtues, all remembrance of a bitter political and religious spirit may well be sunk. He was not a man qualified to have opinions, strictly so called. He could not sympathize in any views but those immediately held by himself; and the views which he most quarreled with were usually those which had been, no long time before, virulently held by himself.

  His forehead was very broad; his height was five feet eleven inches; his complexion rather dark, the eyebrows large and arched, the eye well shaped and dark brown, the mouth somewhat prominent, muscular, and very variously expressive, the chin small in proportion to the upper features of his face. He always, while in Keswick, wore a cap in his walks and partly from habit, partly from the make of his head and shoulders, we never thought he looked well or like himself in a hat. He was of a very spare frame, but of great activity, and not showing any evidence of a weak constitution. My father’s countenance, like his character, seems to have softened down from a certain wildness of expression to a more sober and thoughtful cast; and many thought him a handsomer man in age than in youth; his eye retaining always its brilliancy, and … his countenance its play of expression. Though he did not continue to let his hair hang down on his shoulders according to the whim of his youthful days, yet he always wore a greater quantity than is usual; and once, on his arrival in town, Chantrey’s first greetings to him were accompanied with an injunction to go and get his hair cut. When I first remember it, it was turning from a rich brown to the steel shade, whence it rapidly became almost snowy white, losing none of its remarkable thickness, and clustering in abundant curls over his massive brow.

  Never in the course of my existence have I known a man so excellent on so many points. What he was as a son, is now remembered by few; what he was as a husband and a father, shows it more clearly than the best memory could represent it. The purity of his youth, the integrity of his manhood, the soundness of his judgment, and the tenderness of his heart, they alone who have been blest with the same qualities can appreciate. And who are they? Many with one, some with more than one, nobody with all of them in the like degree. So there are several who possess one quality of his poetry; none who possess the whole variety…. Conscience with Southey stood on the other side of Enthusiasm. What he saw, he said; what he found, he laid open.

  Some people assert that genius is inconsistent with domestic happiness, and yet Southey was happy at home and made his home happy, he not only loved his wife and children though he was a poet, but he loved them better because he was a poet. He seems to have been without taint of worldliness. London with its pomps and vanities, learned coteries with their dry pedantry, rather scared than attracted him. He found his prime glory in his genius, and his chief felicity in home affections. I like Southey.

  How great and how good a man he was! how fine a specimen of the generosity of labour! Giving so largely, so liberally, so unostentatiously, not from the superfluities of an abundant fortune, but from the hard-won earnings of his indefatigable toil! Some people complain of his change of politics; and I, for my own particular part, wish very heartily that he had been content with a very moderate modification of opinion. But does not the violent republicanism of youth often end in the violent toryism of age? Does not the pendulum, very forcibly set in motion, swing as far one way as it has swung the other? Does not the sun rise in the east and set in the west? As to his poetry, I suspect people of liking it better than they say…. Never was a man more beloved by all who approached him. Even his peculiarities, if he had any, were genial and pleasant.

  His long and valuable works advanced slowly, because he always had different tasks on hand, and like a thorough-bred man of business, could at any time turn from one to another; but they advanced unremittingly; they were not scrawled and patched up invitâ Minervâ, careless of all but the citizen’s only object, to obtain immediate pelf; but they were finished so as to gain the author’s approbation in the first place. Among his minor peculiarities I cannot but remember how in his unequalled calligraphy, he revived the accomplishment of monastic scribes in the middle ages, and how in divers instances he completed a long MS., bound it handsomely, and kept it for years on his shelves, before he thought of publication. Labor ipsa voluptas erat, even without one particle of pecuniary gain.

  His hair [in 1839] was black, and yet his complexion was fair; his eyes I believe to be hazel and large; but I will not vouch for that fact: his nose aquiline; and he has a remarkable habit of looking up into the air, as if looking at abstractions. The expression of his face was that of a very acute and aspiring man. So far, it was even noble, as it conveyed a feeling of a serene and gentle pride, habitually familiar with elevating subjects of contemplation. And yet it was impossible that this pride could have been offensive to anybody, chastened as it was by the most unaffected modesty; and this modesty made evident and prominent by the constant expression of reverence for the great men of the age (when he happened to esteem them such), and for all the great patriarchs of our literature. The point in which Southey’s manner failed the most in conciliating regard was in all which related to the external expressions of friendliness. No man could be more sincerely hospitable—no man more essentially disposed to give up even his time (the possession which he most valued) to the service of his friends. But there was an air of reserve and distance about him—the reserve of a lofty, self-respecting mind, but, perhaps, a little too freezing—in his treatment of all persons who were not among the corps of his ancient fireside friends. Still, even towards the veriest strangers, it is but justice to notice his extreme courtesy in sacrificing his literary employments for the day, whatever they might be, to the duty (for such he made it) of doing the honours of the lake and the adjacent mountains…. 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.

  In associating with Southey, not only was it necessary to salvation to refrain from touching his books, but various rites, ceremonies, and usages must be rigidly observed. At certain appointed hours only was he open to conversation; at the seasons which had been predestined from all eternity for holding intercourse with his friends. Every hour of the day had its commission—every half-hour was assigned to its own peculiar, undeviating function. The indefatigable student gave a detailed account of his most painstaking life, every moment of which was fully employed and strictly pre-arranged, to a certain literary Quaker lady. “I rise at five throughout the year; from six till eight I read Spanish; then French for one hour; Portuguese next, for half an hour,—my watch lying on the table; I give two hours to poetry; I write prose for two hours; I translate so long; I make extracts so long,” and so of the rest until the poor fellow had fairly fagged himself into his bed again. “And, pray, when dost thou think, friend?” she asked, dryly, to the great discomfiture of the future Laureate.

  An English worthy, doing his duty for fifty noble years of labour, day by day storing up learning, day by day working for scant wages, most charitable out of his small means, bravely faithful to the calling which he had chosen, refusing to turn from his path for popular praise or princes’ favour; I mean Robert Southey. We have left his old political landmarks miles and miles behind; we protest against his dogmatism; nay, we begin to forget it and his politics; but I hope his life will not be forgotten, for it is sublime in its simplicity, its energy, its honour, its affection! In the combat between Time and Thalaba, I suspect the former destroyer has conquered; Kehama’s curse frightens very few readers now; but Southey’s private letters are worth piles of epics, and are sure to last among us as long as kind hearts like to sympathize with goodness and purity and love and upright life.

  Southey was a man well up in the fifties; [1835, was sixty-one] hair gray, not yet hoary, well setting off his fine clear-brown complexion; head and face both smallish; as indeed the figure was while seated; features finely cut; eyes, brow, mouth, good in their kind; expressive all, and even vehemently so, but betokening rather keenness than depth either of intellect or character; a serious, human, honest, but sharp almost fierce-looking thin man, with very much of the militant in his aspect,—in the eyes especially was legible a mixture of sorrow and of anger, or of angry contempt, as if his indignant fight with the world had not yet ended in victory, but also never should in defeat…. Southey at last completely rose from his chair to shake hands: he had only half-risen and nodded on my coming in; and all along I had counted him a lean little man; but now he shot suddenly aloft into a lean tall one; all legs, in shape and stature like a pair of tongs,—which peculiarity my surprise doubtless exaggerated to me, but only made it the more notable and entertaining…. Had again more than once to notice the singular readiness of the blushes,—amiable red blush, beautiful like a young girl’s, when you touched genially the pleasant theme; and serpent-like flash of blue or black blush (this far, very far the rarer kind, though it did recur, too), when you struck upon the opposite…. Now blushing, under his gray hairs, rosy like a maiden of fifteen; now slaty almost, like a rattle-snake, or fiery serpent. How has he not been torn to pieces long since, under such furious pulling this way and that? He must have somewhere a great deal of methodic virtue in him; I suppose, too, his heart is thoroughly honest, which helps considerably!

  A man so lovable, so pure-hearted, sound-hearted, manly, tender, and true.

  I never met any literary man who so thoroughly answered my expectations as Southey. His face is at once shrewd, thoughtful, and quick, if not irritable, in its expression; a singular deficiency of space in its lower portion, but no deficiency of feature or expression; his manner cold, but still; in conversation, bland and gentle, and not nearly so dogmatic as his writings would lead one to imagine.

  He wrought in his place day after day, season after season. He submitted to the good laws of use and wont. He grew stronger, calmer, more full-fraught with stores of knowledge, richer in treasure of the heart. Time laid its hand upon him gently and unfalteringly: the bounding step became less light and swift; the ringing voice lapsed into sadder fits of silence; the raven hair changed to a snowy white; only still the indefatigable eye ran down the long folio columns, and the indefatigable hand still held the pen—until all true life had ceased…. What makes the life of Southey eminent and singular, is its unity of purpose, its persistent devotion to a chosen object, its simplicity, purity, loyalty, fortitude, kindliness, truth.

  I knew Southey only in London, meeting him more than once at the house of Allan Cunningham. I wish I had known more of him, for in my heart and mind he holds a place higher than is held by any other great man with whom I have been acquainted. To me, he is the beau-ideal of the Man of Letters; a glory to his calling to whom all succeeding authors by profession may point back with pride. Not only was his life one of diligent and fruitful labor; it was marked by almost every manly virtue that may combine to crown a king of men. If we look at his public career we find it distinguished throughout by industry, energy, rigid integrity, and noble pride—the pride of a Sidney of the pen, whose aim before all things was to keep his honor stainless. We turn to his private life, and all we learn of it shows to us Southey as a devoted husband, a judicious and affectionate father, a warm and faithful friend. Though he had to struggle, nearly all his own life through with poverty, he was ever ready to hold out a helping hand to those whose struggles for fame were just beginning, or as in the case of Chatterton’s sister, to tender generous and effectual aid to the unfortunate relatives they had left…. My remembrance of him is that of a form, not tall but stately—a countenance full of power, yet also of gentleness; and eyes whose keen and penetrating glance had justly caused them to be likened to the hawk’s, but that on occasion could beam and soften with the kindliest and tenderest emotion. His head was perhaps the noblest and handsomest among English writers of his time.

  His guerdon of praise must be without suspicion of blame where his life and character stand for judgment. His personal purity was indeed the purity of Marcus Cato, who was virtuous by the necessity of a happy nature which could not be otherwise.

  In his conversation Southey was perfectly easy and unpretending, never shunning to speak his real sentiments of men, or of principles, either of a public or a private nature. And though very caustic sometimes, and even severe in his remarks, yet generally far more inclining to the good-natured in his opinions and in his discourse.

  In the autumn of 1823 I went to the Lake country and paid a visit to Southey. He was then about fifty years of age. He was the first of our great men with whom I had come face to face. Afterwards I became acquainted with most of his eminent contemporaries, and of my own—with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Moore, Campbell, Tennyson, and Browning, among poets; among historians, with Hallam, Macaulay, Froude, Carlyle, and Lecky; among statesmen, with all, I think, that were conspicuous except Canning, Brougham, and Disraeli; and I have found none who combined with intellectual pre-eminence so much of what was personally attractive.

  Southey was probably one of the most representative of literary men. His feelings in his library are those of all book-lovers, although he could express these feelings in language which few of them have at command.

  “The Ballad-Monger,” “The Bard of the Bay,” “The Blackbird,” “My Epic Renegade,” “The First Man of Letters in Europe,” “Illustrious Conqueror of Common-Sense,” “Mouthy,” “The Poet of Greta Hall,” “Turncoat.”

  Such was this knightly, this true brotherly and fatherly man—this gentleman, head and shoulders above the literati of his day in pure unselfishness, unworldliness, and simple-minded honesty; such this true defender of the sanctities of house and home; this pattern father, husband, and friend; this exemplar of unostentatious piety; this high-souled, pure-hearted, patient man; this genial host. Such was this lofty scholar, this humble, child-like doer of each day’s work to the full reach of his power; this encyclopædia of learning; this grave thinker; this poet of his time.

  He did not write very rapidly; and he corrected, both in MS. and in proof, with the utmost sedulity. Of the nearly 14,000 books which he possessed at his death, it is safe to say that all had been methodically read, and most read many times; while his almost mediæval diligence did not hesitate at working through a set of folios to obtain the information or the corrections necessary for a single article.

  It is a curious fact that Southey holds no place in the hearts of present lovers of poetry, yet in his lifetime no one was more honoured than he. It may be that his personality, rather than his poems, attracted the admiration of his contemporaries. Now no one knows him. Who in the present generation has read “Thalaba,” that “wild and wondrous song,” or the “Curse of Kehama,” as wild, as strange, as fascinating? Why were these poems the delight of the age which saw their birth, and are yet forgotten now? To me, who in my childhood lived upon them, this must ever remain a mystery. Let me try to picture Southey as he sat in my mother’s drawing-room. I do not remember that his features were particularly striking, and he was not tall, or of the stately presence which characterised his brother, Dr. H. H. Southey. But his eyes! A dark and liquid brown, so full of love, when he was silent and calm, that you thought perchance nothing but love was there; but when he spoke the liquid brown was fire, yet fire made of roses, and the beam that darted from his eyes seemed to reach far into the room. Again I say, would that I could remember the words he spoke; but I was a child, and a very young one.

  The change in Southey’s political and religious opinions which made the republican of 1793 a tory, the author of “Wat Tyler” a poet laureate, and the independent thinker whom Coleridge had just managed to convert from deism to unitarianism a champion of the established church, inevitably exposed Southey to attack from the advocates of the opinions he had forsaken. There can be no question of Southey’s perfect sincerity. The evolution of his views did not differ materially from that traceable in the cases of Wordsworth and Coleridge. But the immediate advantage to the convert was more visible and tangible, and Southey provoked retaliation by the uncharitable tone he habitually adopted in controversy with those whose sentiments had formerly been his own. Every question presented itself to him on the ethical side. But constitutionally he was a bigot; an opinion for him must be either moral or immoral; those which he did not himself share inevitably fell into the latter class, and their propagators appeared to him enemies of society. At the same time his reactionary tendencies were not unqualified. He could occasionally express liberal sentiments.

Poems

  I should say that the predominant qualities of his poetry were picturesqueness, sweetness of sentiment, and purity of diction…. He is now my favorite. His miscellaneous poems are full of various excellence.

  Southey never treads in the beaten track; his thoughts, while they are those of nature, carry that cast of originality which is the stamp and testimony of genius…. To this faculty of bold discrimination I attribute many of Mr. Southey’s peculiarities as a poet. He never seems to enquire how other men would treat a subject, or what may happen to be the usage of the times; but, filled with that strong sense of fitness, which is the result of bold and unshackled thought, he fearlessly pursues that course which his own sense of propriety points out.

	O Southey! Southey! cease thy varied song!
	A bard may chant too often and too long:
	As thou art strong in verse, in mercy spare!
	A fourth, alas! were more than we could bear.
	But if, in spite of all the world can say,
	Thou still wilt verseward plod thy weary way;
	If still in Berkeley ballads most uncivil,
	Thou wilt devote old women to the devil,
	The babe unborn thy dread intent may rue;
	“God help thee,” Southey, and thy readers too.

  How Southey has fallen! A Pegasus like his turned into a cream-coloured horse for State occasions: it is quite melancholy.

  His Laureate odes are utterly and intolerably bad, and, if he had never written anything else, must have ranked him below Colley Cibber in genius, and above him in conceit and presumption.

  Of Mr. Southey’s larger epics, I have but a faint recollection at this distant time, but all that I remember of them is mechanical and extravagant, heavy and superficial. His affected, disjointed style is well imitated in the Rejected Addresses. The difference between him and Sir Richard Blackmore seems to be that the one is heavy and the other light, the one solemn and the other pragmatical, the one phlegmatic and the other flippant; and that there is no Gay in the present time to give a Catalogue Raisonné of the performances of the living undertaker of epics.

  The poetry of Mr. Southey occupies not fewer than 14 volumes in crown octavo; and it embraces subjects of almost every description. “Thalaba” has long been, and will long continue to be, very generally known and admired. It was abundantly popular at the period of its publication. The “Curse of Kehama” is perhaps the greatest effort of the author’s genius; but his “Roderic,” or the “Last of the Goths,” is that which seems to have received his most careful elaboration and finishing. It is a grand poem. “Madoc,” though full of wild imagery, and with verse of occasionally uncouth structure, is not destitute of some of the most brilliant touches of the poet.

  His poems, taken in the mass, stand far higher than his prose works. The Laureate Odes, indeed, among which the “Vision of Judgment” must be classed, are, for the most part, worse than Pye’s and as bad as Cibber’s; nor do we think him generally happy in short pieces. But his longer poems, though full of faults, are nevertheless very extraordinary productions. We doubt greatly whether they will be read fifty years hence; but that, if they are read, they will be admired, we have no doubt whatever.

  Southey, among our living Poets, stands aloof and “alone in his glory;” for he alone of them all has adventured to illustrate, in Poems of magnitude, the different characters, customs, and manners of nations. “Joan of Arc” is an English and French story; “Thalaba,” Arabian; “Kehama,” Indian; “Madoc,” Welsh and American; and “Roderick,” Spanish and Moorish; nor would it be easy to say (setting aside the first, which was a very youthful work) in which of these noble Poems Mr. Southey has most successfully performed an achievement entirely beyond the power of any but the highest genius…. Of all his chief Poems the conception and the execution are original; in much faulty and imperfect both; but bearing throughout the impress of original power, and breathing a moral charm, in the midst of the wildest, and sometimes even extravagant, imaginings, that shall preserve them forever from oblivion, embalming them in the spirit of delight and of love.

	Rare architect of many a wondrous tale
	Which, till Helvellyn’s head lie prostrate, shall remain!

  There is a plain, searching, but not vulgar truth in his eclogues, which places them by the side of Crabbe’s most forcible and finished cabinet pictures,—a quaintness, a credulity, and a humour in his ballads, especially in those of witchcraft and monkery, which belong to one steeped in the spirit of ancient tradition. Again, in his more elaborate works, how rich is their diction, and how superior in its richness to the cumbrous and false pomp of some of his predecessors, who have attempted the epic.

  Southey,—who, with all his rich and varied accomplishments, has comparatively but a small portion of Wordsworth’s genius, and whose “wild and wondrous lays” are the very antithesis to Wordsworth’s intense musings on humanity and new consecrations of familiar things.

	Keen as an eagle whose flight towards the dim empyréan
	Fearless of toil or fatigue ever royally wends!
	Vast in the cloud-coloured robes of the balm-breathing Orient
	Lo! the grand Epic advances, unfolding the humanest truth.

  Southey shone in the paths of gentle meditation and philosophic reflection; but his chief strength lay in description, where he had few equals. It was there that he revelled and rioted in the exuberant energy of his spirit—a devoted worshipper of nature. Akenside describes a landscape as it affects the fancy; Cowper as it impresses the feelings; Southey daguerreotypes the landscape itself. Coleridge descants on the waving of a leaf; Southey, on its colour and configuration. Wordsworth delights in out-flowing sentiment; Southey in picturesque outline. His capacious mind may be likened to a variegated continent, one region of which is damp with fogs, rough with rocks, barren and unprofitable; the other bright with glorious sunshine, valleys of rich luxuriance, and forests of perennial verdure.

  Southey’s “Madoc,” “Don Roderick,” and the “Curse of Kehama” are splendid metrical histories, but they do not contain the traits which speak at once to all mankind: they are addressed to the learned and studious, and these are a mere fragment of the human race. Admired, accordingly, by the well-informed, they are already comparatively unknown to the great body of readers; and the author’s poetical fame rests chiefly on “Thalaba,” in which his brilliant imagination revelled without control, save that of high moral feeling, in the waterless deserts and palm-shaded fountains and patriarchal life of the Happy Arabia.

  He went to it too mechanically, and with too much nonchalance; and the consequence was a vast many words to little matter. Nor had he the least music in him at all. The consequence of which was, that he wrote prose out into lyrical wild shapes, and took the appearance of it for verse. Yet there was otherwise a poetical nature distributed through the mass, idly despising the concentration that would have been the salvation of it.

  I am not sure whether it might not be put as a test of the existence or otherwise of a pure love of the art in any man that he should like or dislike these achievements of Southey; and if Ariosto is able to retain his readers, it appears hardly creditable to the public taste of our time that Southey should entirely lose his. It is at least certain that for many subtle and pleasing varieties of rhythm, for splendor of invention, for passion and incident sustained often at the highest level, and for all that raises and satisfies wonder and fancy, there will be found in “Thalaba,” “Kehama,” and “Roderick” passages of unrivalled excellence (“perfect,” even Byron thought); and these may here excuse, if they do not wholly justify, the hopes that once centred in them, and to which exalted expression is given in the correspondence of the friends.

  Southey divides with Scott the honor of writing the first long narrative poems in our language which can be read without occasional weariness.

  Southey, like Drayton, has left little work vividly penetrated with the spirit of poetry, in comparison with his many pages of skilful and industrious manufacture.

  Southey never freed himself absolutely from the shackles prescribed for poets of “sense” and “wit.” His vital impulse never burst forth unmanageably into spiritual landscapes hitherto untrodden. No ungovernable flash of natural magic ever came uppermost in his soul to pester his genius with dread of trespassing on the realm of arbitrary reason. He was never troubled to weave into the woof of his rational art, the weft of some irrational emotion. All that came to him, came tranquilly; all that he could see he could command; and no unsatisfied yearning after unattainable things ever threatened to drive him beyond limits of sanity. Moreover, his poetry dealt with lofty or obscure, noble, dubious, or distant subjects, not with homely ones.

  Southey’s patriotic rubbish was no better, and not much worse, than his verse at large.

  No one has described the invigorating and soothing power of books more happily than Southey; and, with two or three exceptions, there is, perhaps, no man of letters of this century whose name is worthier of esteem. Yet the reader who acknowledges this allegiance may confess at the same time that a measured feeling of admiration is the utmost he can give to Southey’s poetry. His epics are not among the books he reads upon sleepless nights; neither will he take them with him on a voyage…. Poetry made Southey happy, and he thought that it would make him immortal. The happiness was enjoyed to the full, but the ten volumes of his verse have not as yet received the recognition which their author anticipated. We are interested in learning that William Taylor, of Norwich, called “Madoc” the best English poem that had left the press since “Paradise Lost;” that Walter Scott read it through four times; that it kept Fox up until after midnight; that Landor said of “Roderick,” “there is no poem in existence that I shall read so often;” and that even Byron pronounced it “the first poem of the time.” And in our day we hear with curiosity how Dean Stanley upheld against all comers the poetical merits of “Thalaba” and “Kehama.” People read these criticisms and opinions, but they do not read the poems; and, as a poet, Southey is chiefly known to the present generation by his fantastic ballads and by a few personal lyrics which, like the “Holly Tree” and the stanzas written in his library, touch all hearts.

  Southey’s larger poems, “Thalaba,” “The Curse of Kehama,” and especially “Roderick,” seemed to me then the great epics of the age. I am not at all certain that I gave them too high a place in my admiration, and as I write I cannot remember any English epic that I have been able to read through since I read “Roderick,” not even “Festus” or “Orion.”

  His disciple and latest unflinching admirer, Sir Henry Taylor, has told us that Southey “took no pleasure in poetic passion”—a melancholy admission. We could have guessed as much from his voluminous and vigorous writing, from which imagination is conspicuously absent, though eloquence, vehemence, fluency, and even fancy are abundant.

Joan of Arc, 1796

  With “Joan of Arc” I have been delighted, amazed; I had not presumed to expect anything of such excellence from Southey. Why the poem is alone sufficient to redeem the character of the age we live in from the imputation of degenerating in Poetry.

  Robert Southey, author of many ingenious pieces of poetry of great promise, if the young gentlemen would recollect what old Chaucer says of poetry,

	“’Tis every dêle
	A rock of ice and not of steel.”

He gave the publick a long quarto volume of epick verses, “Joan of Arc,” written, he says in the preface, in six weeks. Had he meant to write well, he should have kept it at least six years.—I mention this, for I have been much pleased with many of the young gentleman’s little copies of verses. I wish also that he would review some of his principles.

  Mr. Southey’s “Joan of Arc,” though incorrect, and written with inexcusable rapidity, reflects great credit on his genius and abilities; the sentiments are noble and generous, and burn with an enthusiastic ardour for liberty; the characters, especially that of his Heroine, are well supported, and his visionary scenes are rich with bold and energetic imagery. His fable, however, I can not but consider peculiarly unfortunate, as directly militating against national pride and opinion…. The versification of this poem is in many parts very beautiful, and would have been altogether so, had the author condescended to bestow more time on its elaboration.

  I looked over the first five books of the first quarto edition of “Joan of Arc” yesterday, at Hood’s request, in order to mark the lines written by me. I was really astonished, first, at the schoolboy wretched allegoric machinery,—second, at the transmogrification of the fanatic virago, into a modern novel-pawing proselyte of “The Age of Reason,” a Tom Paine in Petticoats, but so lovely?—

“On her ruby cheek hung pity’s crystal gem,”

third, at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb down of the pauses, and of the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew, in the single lines.

  “Joan of Arc,” as it was first in the order of time, so was never to be properly regarded as anything more than a splendid promise, and has not been reared into anything higher by all the careful emendation of its author in his riper years.

  “Joan of Arc” was an achievement of strenuous ambition. Crude and feeble as many of its pages are, the poem has in it the glow and ardor of the time.

Thalaba the Destroyer, 1801

  The first thing that strikes the reader of “Thalaba” is the singular structure of the versification, which is a jumble of all the measures that are known in English poetry (and a few more), without rhyme, and without any sort of regularity in their arrangement. Blank odes have been known in this country about as long as English sapphics and dactylics; and both have been considered, we believe, as a species of monsters, or exotics, that were not very likely to propagate, or thrive, in so unpropitious a climate. Mr. Southey, however, has made a vigorous effort for their naturalization, and generously endangered his own reputation in their behalf. The melancholy fate of his English sapphics, we believe, is but too generally known; and we can scarcely predict a more favourable issue to the present experiment.

  “Thalaba” was the first fruits of one of Southey’s earliest ambitions, for he tells us himself that even in his schooldays he had formed the design of writing a great poem on each of the more important mythologies. “Thalaba” is based upon the Mahometan and is written in an irregular form of blank verse…. Southey describes it as “the Arabesque ornament of an Arabian tale,” and as such it is perhaps the fitting garb of an Oriental fiction—a lawless measure for a lawless song. The poem recounts the adventures and triumphs of an Arabian hero at war with the powers of evil, but though often characterized by beauty of expression and grandeur of scene, lacks the human interest which attaches only to the record of the thoughts, feelings, and actions of men and women moving within the limits of natural law, and the sphere of human sympathy.

Madoc, 1805

  It is well calculated to confirm our admiration of Mr. Southey’s genius and capacity, and our dislike of those heresies by which so much of their merit is obscured.

  Tea and chess with Mrs. Barbauld. Read on my way to her house Chapters VIII. to XIV. of Southey’s “Madoc.” Exceedingly pleased with the touching painting in this poem. It has not the splendid glare of “Kehama,” but there is a uniform glow of pure and beautiful morality and interesting description, which renders the work very pleasing. Surely none but a pedant can effect or be seduced to think slightingly of this poem. At all events, the sensibility which feels such beauties is more desirable than the acuteness which could suggest severe criticism.

  On returning from a vist to the Lakes, I told Porson that Southey had said to me, “My ‘Madoc’ has brought me in a mere trifle; but that poem will be a valuable possession to my family.” Porson answered, “‘Madoc’ will be read—when Homer and Virgil are forgotten” (a bon-mot which reached Lord Byron, and which his lordship spoilt).

  “Madoc” stands somewhat away from the line of Southey’s other narrative poems. Though, as Scott objected, the personages in “Madoc” are too nearly abstract types, Southey’s ethical spirit dominates this poem less than any of the others. The narrative flows on more simply. The New-World portion tells a story full of picturesque incident, with the same skill and grace that belong to Southey’s best prose writings…. Those, however, who opened the bulky quarto were few: the tale was out of relation with the time; it interpreted no need, no aspiration, no passion of the dawn of the present century. And the mind of the time was not enough disengaged to concern itself deeply with the supposed adventures of a Welsh prince of the twelfth century among the natives of America.

  Southey went to Wales on purpose to make himself sure of the scenery, and accumulated as much learning in his notes as would not have misbecome the most authentic and dignified history. We can but say alas! when all is done. How is it that the effect does not follow? Here there is everything but one thing, the altar laid, the sacrifice extended, the faggots ready as in that famous offering prepared by the priests of Baal; but the divine spark is wanting, and no touch from heaven sets it alight.

The Curse of Kehama, 1810

  The subject you have chosen is magnificent. There is more genius in the conception of this design than in the execution of any recent poem, however perfect. Shall I avow to you that in general I am most delighted with those passages which are in rhyme, and that when I come into the blank verse again my ear repines?… You have begun a poem which will be coeval with our language. March on: conciliate first, then conquer. The ears of thousands may be captivated,—the mind and imagination of but few.

  Spent part of the evening with Charles Lamb (unwell) and his sister. He had just read the “Curse of Kehama,” which he said he liked better than any of Southey’s long poems. The descriptions he thought beautiful, particularly the finding of Kailyal by Ereenia. He liked the opening, and part of the description of hell; but, after all, he was not made happier by reading the poem. There is too much trick in it. The three statutes and the vacant space for Kehama resemble a pantomime scene; and the love is ill managed. On the whole, however, Charles Lamb thinks the poem infinitely superior to “Thalaba.”

  The general diction of the work is admirably strong, and various, and free; and, in going through it, we have repeatedly exulted in the capabilities of the English language. The author seems to have in a great measure grown out of that affected simplicity of expression, of which he has generally been accused. The versification, as to measure and rhyme, is a complete defiance of all rule and all example; the lines are of any length, from four syllables to fourteen; there are sometimes rhymes and sometimes none; and they have no settled order of recurrence. This is objectionable, chiefly, as it allows the poet to riot away in a wild wantonness of amplification, and at the very same time imposes on him the petty care of having the lines so printed as to put the letterpress in the form of a well-adjusted picture.

  “Kehama” is a loose sprawling, figure, such as we see cut out of wood or paper, and pulled or jerked with wire or thread, to make sudden and surprising motions, without meaning, grace, or nature in them.

  “Kehama,” the only great poem in which the poet no longer disdains the almost indispensable aid to poetry in our modern and loosely quantified tongue, is much better than any of the others. The Curse itself is about as good as it can be, and many other passages are not far below it; but to the general taste the piece suffers from the remote character of the subject, which is not generally and humanly interesting, and from the mass of tedious detail.

Roderick, 1814

  I have read “Roderick” over and over again, and am more and more convinced that it is the noblest epic poem of the age. I have had some correspondence, and a good deal of conversation, with Mr. Jeffrey about it, though he does not agree with me in every particular. He says, it is too long, and wants elasticity and will not, he fears, be generally read, though much may be said in its favor.

  This is the best, we think, and the most powerful of all Mr. Southey’s poems. It abounds with lofty sentiments, and magnificent imagery; and contains more rich and comprehensive descriptions—more beautiful pictures of pure affection—and more impressive representations of mental agony and exaltation than we have often met with in the compass of a single volume…. The author is a poet undoubtedly; but not of the highest order. There is rather more of rhetoric than of inspiration about him—and we have oftener to admire his taste and industry in borrowing and adorning, than the boldness or felicity of his inventions. He has indisputably a great gift of amplifying and exalting; but uses it, we must say, rather unmercifully. He is never plain, concise, or unaffectedly simple, and is so much bent upon making the most of everything, that he is perpetually overdoing…. This want of relief and variety is sufficiently painful of itself in a work of such length; but its worst effect is, that it gives an air of falsetto and pretension to the whole strain of the composition, and makes us suspect the author of imposture and affectation, even when he has good enough cause for his agonies and raptures.

  In “Kehama” he has exhibited virtue struggling against the most dreadful inflictions with heavenly fortitude, and made manifest to us the angel-guards who love to wait on innocence and goodness. But in “Roderic” the design has even a higher scope, is more difficult of execution; and, so far as I know, unique. The temptations which beset a single soul have been a frequent subject, and one sure of sympathy if treated with any power. Breathlessly we watch the conflict, with heartfelt anguish mourn defeat, or with heart-expanding triumph hail a conquest. But, where there has been defeat, to lead us back with the fallen one through the thorny and desolate paths of repentance to purification, to win not only our pity, but our sympathy, for one crushed and degraded by his own sin; and finally, through his faithful though secret efforts to redeem the past, secure to him, justly blighted and world-forsaken as he is, not only our sorrowing love, but our respect;—this Southey alone has done, perhaps alone could do.

  The hero of this poem is no far-off shadowy creature; he is a man, with a man’s passions, and thoughts, and weakness, who treads the common path, and is kin to ourselves by his failures. And in point of technique also, “Roderick” may be taken as representing Southey’s maturer powers. His faculty of simple, vivid description is here at its highest, though, like most of his predecessors and contemporaries, he only looked upon Nature from the outside; and the dramatic quality is here more strongly developed than in his other work.

  The blank verse of Southey’s “Roderick, the Last of the Goths” has great merit as narrative verse, and is worthy of careful study. The variations on the theme-metre, and the resultant pause melody, show not only great metrical skill, but a moulding spirit which is quite a law to itself, and beyond mere skill.

  “Roderick” was the last of his great poems, and is in many respects the best.

Wat Tyler, 1817

  The poem “Wat Tyler,” appeared to him to be the most seditious book that was ever written; its author did not stop short of exhorting to general anarchy; he vilified kings, priests, and nobles, and was for universal suffrage and perfect equality. The Spencean plan could not be compared with it: that miserable and ridiculous performance did not attempt to employ any arguments; but the author of “Wat Tyler” constantly appealed to the passions, and in a style which the author, at that time, he supposed, conceived to be eloquence. Why, then, had not those who thought it necessary to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act taken notice of this poem? Why had not they discovered the author of that seditious publication, and visited him with the penalties of the law? The work was not published secretly, it was not handed about in the darkness of night, but openly and publicly sold in the face of day. It was at this time to be purchased at almost every bookseller’s shop in London: it was now exposed for sale in a bookseller’s shop in Pall-Mall, who styled himself bookseller to one or two of the royal families. He borrowed the copy from which he had just read the extract from an honourable friend of his, who bought it in the usual way; and, therefore, he supposed there could be no difficulty in finding out the party that wrote it.

  As to “Wat Tyler.” Now, sir, though you are not acquainted with the full history of this notable production, yet you could not have been ignorant that the author whom you attacked at such unfair advantage was the aggrieved, and not the offending, person. You knew that this poem had been written very many years ago, in his early youth. You knew that a copy of it had been surreptitiously obtained and made public by some skulking scoundrel, who had found booksellers not more honorable than himself to undertake the publication. You knew that it was published without the writer’s knowledge, for the avowed purpose of insulting him, and with the hope of injuring him, if possible. You knew that the transaction bore upon its face every character of baseness and malignity. You knew that it must have been effected either by robbery or by breach of trust. These things, Mr. William Smith, you knew! and, knowing them as you did, I verily believe, that if it were possible to revoke what is irrevocable, you would at this moment be far more desirous of blotting from remembrance the disgraceful speech, which stands upon record in your name, than I should be of canceling the boyish composition which gave occasion to it. “Wat Tyler” is full of errors, but they are the errors of youth and ignorance; they bear no indication of an ungenerous spirit or of a malevolent heart.

  It obtained a far greater notoriety, through incidental circumstances, than its intrinsic merit or demerit could warrant; and posterity will wonder at the extreme acrimony exhibited in the writings of the parties, who waged a warfare of petty personal annoyance and spite, on account of so ordinary a performance.

  Many years after this was written, and, as Southey fondly hoped, forgotten, he being at the time a pensioned supporter of the Government, he was startled by reading an advertisement of “Wat Tyler,” by Robert Southey, “a Dramatic Poem, with a preface suitable to recent circumstances, London, W. Hone,” and shortly afterwards he received a copy of the drama, addressed to Robert Southey, Poet Laureate, and Renegade. By the advice of his friends, Southey applied for an injunction to restrain the publication; Lord Eldon refused to grant this protection, on the plea that “a person cannot recover damages upon a work which in its nature is calculated to do injury to the public.” This decision was not only extremely annoying to Southey, but greatly increased the notoriety of the reprint of the drama, of which no less than 60,000 copies were sold in a very short time, and it is even now much more frequently met with than any of his other poems. Southey’s political opponents did not let the matter rest here, for both Lord Brougham and Mr. William Smith, member for Norwich, drew attention in the House to Southey’s inconsistent writings, contrasting “Wat Tyler” with his later Conservative articles in “The Quarterly Review,” and inquiring why the Government had taken no steps to prosecute the author of that treasonable play. These proceedings reflected little credit on either party.

A Vision of Judgment, 1821

  We are too happy to be done with him, to think of adding a word more.

  It hath been wisely said, that “One fool makes many,” and it hath been poetically observed

“That fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

If Mr. Southey had not rushed in where he had no business, and where he never was before, and never will be again, the following poem would not have been written. It is not impossible that it may be as good as his own, seeing that it cannot, by any species of stupidity, natural or acquired, be worse. The gross flattery, the dull impudence, the renegado intolerance, and impious cant, of the poem by the author of “Wat Tyler,” are something so stupendous as to form the sublime of himself—containing the quintessence of his own attributes.

  Byron’s satire has given that poem an immortality which it would never otherwise have gained. But Southey’s poem is more profane than even Byron’s. Southey really ventured on anticipating the judgment of heaven; Byron only intended to sneer at Southey’s gross presumption.

  In this most impious work, he fearlessly condemns or rewards political personages at the day of judgment, according as their opinions coincide or not with his own, in a manner so little short of blasphemy, as to disgust his best friends and create greater activity amongst his foes.

  It is always to be regretted that in his anxiety to do his whole duty, to fulfill all the obligations of his office, Southey should have written “The Vision of Judgment.” The error was also partly due to a wish to strike out a new path in a somewhat dreary field, to write something different from the tiresome odes of his predecessors, to be original at the expense of good taste.

Life of Nelson, 1813

  His prose is perfect. Of his poetry there are various opinions. There is, perhaps, too much of it for the present generation; posterity will probably select. He has passages equal to any thing. At present he has a party, but no public,—except for his prose writings. The “Life of Nelson” is beautiful.

  But though in general we prefer Mr. Southey’s poetry to his prose, we must make one exception. The “Life of Nelson” is, beyond all doubt, the most perfect and the most delightful of his works. The fact is, as his poems most abundantly prove, that he is by no means so skilful in designing as filling up. It was therefore an advantage to him to be furnished with an outline of characters and events, and to have no other task to perform than that of touching the cold sketch into life. No writer, perhaps, ever lived, whose talents so precisely qualified him to write the history of the great naval warrior.

  The little “Life of Nelson,” written to furnish young seamen with a simple narrative of the exploits of England’s greatest naval hero, has perhaps never been equalled for the perfection of its style.

  The “Life of Nelson” is a model of unaffected, direct narrative, allowing the facts to speak for themselves through the clearest possible medium of expression; and yet this most popular of Southey’s books, far from being the offspring of any strong personal sympathy or perception, was so entirely a literary job, that he says it was thrust upon him, and that he moved among the sea-terms like a cat among crockery.

  That Southey should live mainly by a book which was merely a publisher’s commission, and not by the works which he and his contemporaries deemed immortal, is one of the ironies of literature.

Life of John Wesley, 1820

  Few persons could have been found, we think, better qualified for the undertaking than Mr. Southey has shown himself to be.

  The “Life of Wesley” will probably live. Defective as it is, it contains the only popular account of a most remarkable moral revolution, and of a man whose eloquence and logical acuteness might have rendered him eminent in literature, whose genius for government was not inferior to that of Richelieu, and who, whatever his errors may have been, devoted all his powers, in defiance of obloquy and derision, to what he sincerely considered as the highest good of his species.

  To this work, and to the Life of R. Baxter, I was used to resort whenever sickness and langour made me feel the want of an old friend of whose company I could never be tired. How many and many an hour of self-oblivion do I owe to this Life of Wesley! and how often have I argued with it, questioned, remonstrated, been peevish, and asked pardon—then again listened, and cried, Right! Excellent! and in yet heavier hours entreated it, as it were, to continue talking to me,—for that I heard and listened, and was soothed, though I could make no reply! Ah! that Robert Southey had fulfilled his intention of writing a history of the Monastic Orders,—or would become the Biographer at least of Loyola, Xavier, Dominic, and the other remarkable Founders.

  It is unnecessary to say that Southey’s work possesses all the merit, and has attained to all the popularity, which befits an elaborate effort of one of the most brilliant of English prose-writers. If the author had no special qualifications for his task, and no unpublished sources of information at his command, his work may nevertheless claim to rival Boswell’s “Johnson” as one of the most entertaining books in the language. Where Southey describes a scene or a person his description may generally be relied on as trustworthy as well as picturesque. Where he ventures to analyse motives or to draw conclusions, his want of fitness for his task becomes very apparent. He diligently compiled for the general reader a “Life of Wesley,” as he did a “Life of Nelson.” But the founder of a religious system is not so easily portrayed as a victorious admiral. Southey’s theory of Methodism was hastily formed, on few and superficial data. Starting with the idea that Wesley, with all his virtues, was an enthusiast, rash, impetuous, credulous, with an ambition to form a great religious sect, Southey allowed this inadequate and erroneous idea to tinge the narrative, and to reduce its permanent value. Thus he laid himself open to the free and friendly rebukes administered by Coleridge, and printed in the notes which appear in the later editions of the book; and he laid himself open to the still sharper criticism of a less distinguished reader, who summed up his opinion of the laureate’s fitness for his task in the significant words, “Thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep.”

  Few more delightful books exist in the language, and none more honest, than his “Life of Wesley.” This “darling book,” the favorite of his library, was more often in his hands, Coleridge wrote, than any other, and he added that it would not be uninteresting to the author to know that to this work, and to the “Life of Baxter,” he was used to resort whenever sickness or langour made him feel the want of an old friend.

History of the Peninsular War, 1823–32

  Talked of Southey: the little reliance that is to be placed upon him as a historian; his base persecution of the memory of Sir J. Moore.

  It is very good, indeed—honest English principle in every line; but there are many prejudices, and there is a tendency to augment a work already too long, by saying all that can be said of the history of ancient times appertaining to every place mentioned.

  The “History of the Peninsular War” is already dead: indeed the second volume was deadborn. The glory of producing an imperishable record of that great conflict seems to be reserved for Colonel Napier.

  It tells an epic story, illustrious with heroic incident and character. From the commencement of the contest, Southey had entertained the hope and intention of recording its events; but he delayed in order to become possessed of the gradually accumulating material. The hero of the epic is Wellington.

The Doctor, 1834–37

  The wit and humor of “The Doctor” have seldom been equalled. We cannot think Southey wrote it, but have no idea who did.

  “The Doctor,” of which the first volume was published anonymously in 1833, and the last some years after his death, the whole pleasantness of Southey’s character with his best sense of life breathes through his love of books.

  A book showing vast accumulation of out-of-the-way bits of learning—full of quibs, and conceits, and oddities; there are traces of Sterne in it and of Rabelais; but there is little trenchant humor of its own. It is a literary jungle; and all its wit sparkles like marsh fire-flies that lead no whither. You may wonder at its erudition; wonder at its spurts of meditative wisdom; wonder at its touches of scholastic cleverness, and its want of any effective coherence, but you wonder more at its waste of power.

Life of Cowper, 1836

  I have just read Southey’s “Life of Cowper;” that is to say, the first volume. It is not a book to be read by every man at the fall of the leaf. It is a fearful book. Have you read it? Southey hits hard at Newton in the dark; which will give offence to many people; but I perfectly agree with him. At the same time I think that Newton was a man of great power. Did you ever read his life by himself? Pray do, if you have not. His journal to his wife, written at sea, contains some of the most beautiful things I ever read: fine feeling in very fine English.

  His sketches of literary history in the “Life of Cowper” are characteristic. The writer’s range is wide, his judgment sound, his enjoyment of almost everything literary is lively; as critic he is kindly yet equitable. But the highest criticism is not his. Southey’s vision was not sufficiently penetrative; he culls beauties, but he cannot pluck out the heart of a mystery.

  Southey’s “Life” is horribly long-winded and stuffed out; still, like Homer’s “Iliad,” it remains the best.

  One chapter of that work is given up to a sketch of English poetry from the time of Chaucer downward. It is made interesting by its style, its partialities, dislikes, prejudices, and especially by the general wrath exhibited in it towards French authors and France. The criticism contained in it will frequently startle the reader. It is the statements of fact, however, that will confound him. They will not confound him so much because they are erroneous, as that Southey should have been ignorant that they were erroneous. He tells us, quite as a matter of course, that Davenant was a poet of higher grade than Dryden; that alliterative verse became obsolete almost as soon as “Piers Ploughman’s Visions” had been composed in it; that Chaucer adopted the seven-lines stanza of “Troilus and Cressida” from the Provençal poets; that in the composition of the ten-syllable couplet he had been shown the way by Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole; that Ben Jonson was one of the two authors by whom the so-called metaphysical style of poetry was brought into vogue, Donne being the other; that the well-known line in Dryden’s characterization of Settle’s poetry, that

“If it rhymed and rattled, all was well,”

was written of Blackmore; and that “Blair’s Grave” was the only poem that had been composed in imitation of Young’s “Night Thoughts,” both works having been contemporaneous in appearance. These are not all the novel facts that can be found in this one chapter; but these will do. After reading it one feels a certain respect for Southey’s courage in censuring Dryden for his carelessness and inaccuracy whenever he touched upon the history of his art. The charge was true; but under the circumstances his were hardly the lips from which it could appropriately come.

General

  The story [“Chronicle of the Cid”] is something between a history and a romance; and Mr. Southey has not attempted to distinguish what is true from what is fabulous; the Spanish literature evidently supplied no means for doing this, nor would it have been worth while, had it been practicable, as the fabulous parts are probably quite as amusing as the true, and gives as striking a picture of the times. In this view, the work is very interesting. We are transported into an age and country where the gentlemen go out to work in the morning, with their steeds and lances, as regularly as the farmers with their team and plough, and indeed, a good deal more so. The Cid surpasses all his contemporaries for diligence and success in such laudable occupation. His course of enterprise is so rapid, so uniformly successful, and so much of a piece in other respects, that in some parts of the book the mind is quite tired of following him. In many other parts, however, the narrative is eminently striking, especially in describing some of the single combats, and most of all, in the long account of an extraordinary court of justice, held on two young princes or noblemen, who had abused their wives, the daughters of the Cid. Nothing in the whole library of romantic history can exceed this narrative.

  Mr. Southey is a most unblushing character; and his political lucubrations are very notable.

  Reflect but on the variety and extent of his acquirements! He stands second to no man, either as a historian or as a bibliographer; and when I regard him as a popular essayist (for the articles of his composition in the reviews are, for the greater part, essays on subjects of deep or curious interest rather than criticisms on particular works)—I look in vain for any writer, who has conveyed so much information, from so many and recondite sources, with so many just and original reflections, in a style so lively and poignant, yet so uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one, in short, who has combined so much wisdom with so much wit, so much truth and knowledge with so much life and fancy. His prose is always intelligible, and always entertaining. In poetry he has attempted almost every species of composition known before, and he has added new ones; and if we except the highest lyric—(in which how few, how very few, even of the greatest minds have been fortunate)—he has attempted every species successfully…. It is Southey’s almost unexampled felicity, to possess the best gifts of talent and genius free from all their characteristic defects…. As son, brother, husband, father, master, friend, he moves with firm yet light steps, alike unostentatious and alike exemplary. As a writer, he has uniformly made his talents subservient to the best interests of humanity, of public virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever been the cause of pure religion and of liberty, of national independence and of national illumination.

  While he himself is anomalous, incalculable, eccentric, from youth to age (the “Wat Tyler” and the “Vision of Judgment” are the Alpha and Omega of his disjointed career) full of sallies of humour, of ebullitions of spleen, making jets-d’eaux, cascades, fountains, and water-works of his idle opinions, he would shut up the wits of others in leaden cisterns, to stagnate and corrupt, or bury them under ground—

“Far from the sun and summer gale!”

He would suppress the freedom of wit and humour, of which he has set the example, and claim a privilege for playing antics.

  We find, we confess, so great a charm in Mr. Southey’s style, that, even when he writes nonsense, we generally read it with pleasure, except indeed where he tries to be droll. A more insufferable jester never existed. He very often attempts to be humorous, and yet we do not remember a single occasion on which he has succeeded further than to be quaintly and flippantly dull. In one of his works, he tells us that Bishop Sprat was very properly so called, inasmuch as he was a very small poet. And in the book now before us, he cannot quote Francis Bugg without a remark on his unsavory name. A man might talk folly like this by his own fireside; but that any human being, after having made such a joke, should write it down, and copy it out, and transmit it to the printer, and correct the proof-sheets, and send it forth into the world, is enough to make us ashamed of our species.

  But the most various, scholastic, and accomplished of such of our literary contemporaries as have written works as well as articles, and prose as well as poetry—is, incontestably, Mr. Southey. The “Life of Nelson” is acknowledged to be the best biography of the day. “The Life of Wesley” and “The Book of the Church,” however adulterated by certain prepossessions and prejudices, are, as mere compositions, characterized by an equal simplicity and richness of style,—an equal dignity and an equal ease. No writer blends more happily the academical graces of the style of the last century with the popular vigor of that which distinguishes the present…. The great charm of that simple power which is so peculiarly Southeian…. Southey’s rich taste and antique stateliness of mind.

  In vigour and variety of genius Robert Southey has few equals. He ranks in poetry with the foremost; in criticism none can be named more sensible and accurate; in biography he is without rivals; while in history he occupies the first rank, and is on the right hand.

  As it stands, it is a piece of mere task-work, executed by a practised and skilful artist, no doubt, but with that economy of labour and thought which may be generally expected to characterise such undertakings…. He has evidently contented himself [“Life of Raleigh”] with the materials nearest at hand, and made no attempt whatever either to correct or to amplify the existing stock of information by any researches amongst unpublished documents.

  A name long dear to the public, as it will be to posterity; an author, the accuracy of whose knowledge does not yield to its extent.

  He was a dogmatist of the most provoking kind,—cool, calm, bitter, and uncompromising; and he delighted to dogmatize on subjects which his mind was unfitted to treat. Nothing could shake his egotism…. As a prose writer Southey was more successful than as a poet. His prose style is of such inimitable grace, clearness and fluency, that it would make nonsense agreeable. His poetry indicates a lack of shaping imagination, and is diffusely elegant in expression. He often gives twenty lines to a comparison, which Shelley or Wordsworth would have compressed into an epithet. In narrative skill, and constructive power, he excels both; and is himself excelled only by Scott…. As a poet, he sems to us to fall below Scott, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and to belong to the second class of contemporary poets. In imagination and true poetic feeling, we should hesitate to place him on an equality with Campbell, Barry Cornwall, Tennyson, and Keats, although in general capacity and acquirements, and especially in force of individual character, he is their superior. It requires no prophetic gift to predict that most of his verse is destined to die.

  Perhaps the raciest English writer of his day.

  The mental habits of Robert Southey, which about a year ago were so extensively praised in the public Journals, are the type of literary existence, just as the praise bestowed on them shows the admiration excited by them among literary people. He wrote poetry (as if anybody could) before breakfast; he read during breakfast. He wrote history until dinner; he corrected proof sheets between dinner and tea; he wrote an essay for the Quarterly afterwards; and after supper, by way of relaxation, composed “The Doctor”—a lengthy, and elaborate jest. Now, what can any one think of such a life?—except how clearly it shows that the habits best fitted for communicating information, formed with the best care, and daily regulated by the best motives, are exactly the habits which are likely to afford a man the least information to communicate. Southey had no events, no experiences. His wife kept house and allowed him pocket-money, just as if he had been a German professor devoted to accents, tobacco, and the dates of Horace’s amours. And it is pitiable to think that so meritorious a life was only made endurable by a painful delusion. He thought that day by day, and hour by hour, he was accumulating stores for the instruction and entertainment of a long posterity. His epics were to be in the hands of all men, and his history of Brazil the “Herodotus of the South American Republics;” as if his epics were not already dead, and as if the people who now cheat at Valparaiso care a real who it was that cheated those before them. Yet it was only by a conviction like this that an industrious and caligraphic man (for such was Robert Southey), who might have earned money as a clerk, worked all his days for half a clerk’s wages, at occupation much duller and more laborious.

  Few better or more blameless men have ever lived; but he seems to lack color, passion, warmth, or something that should enable me to bring him into close relation with myself.

  If we were to name, in a single term, the quality for which Southey is eminent, we should call him a verbal architect…. For pure narrative, where the object is to give the reader unalloyed facts, and leave his own reflection and fancy to shape and color them, no English author has surpassed Southey.

  In the first rank, Southey, a clever man, who, after several mistakes in his youth, became the professed defender of aristocracy and cant, an indefatigable reader, an inexhaustible writer, crammed with erudition, gifted in imagination, famed like Victor Hugo for the freshness of his innovations, the combative tone of his prefaces, the splendours of his picturesque curiosity, having spanned the universe and all history with his poetic shows, and embraced, in the endless web of his verse, Joan of Arc, Wat Tyler, Roderick the Goth, Madoc, Thalaba, Kehama, Celtic, and Mexican traditions, Arabic and Indian legends, successively Catholic, Mussulman, Brahman, but only in verse; in fine, a prudent and licensed Protestant.

  There is not, perhaps, any single work of Southey’s the loss of which would be felt by us as a capital misfortune. But the more we consider his total work, its mass, its variety, its high excellence, the more we come to regard it as a memorable, an extraordinary achievement.

  There have been few English men of letters the difference between whose contemporary and posthumous fame is so great as it is in the case of Southey. He was not, indeed, idolized by his time, and his works have not, to be sure, fallen into complete oblivion, though they avoid that fate by the narrowest of margins, we suspect. Macaulay said of them that he had great doubts whether they would be read “fifty years hence,” but none at all that, if read, they would be admired; but the truth is that they are not read now because it has been discovered that they are not upon the whole admirable.

  There were greater poets in his generation, and there were men of a deeper and more far-reaching philosophic faculty; but take him for all in all,—his ardent and genial piety, his moral strength, the magnitude and variety of his powers, the field which he covered in literature, and the beauty of his life,—it may be said of him, justly, and with no straining of the truth, that of all his contemporaries he was the greatest MAN.

  The pure and altogether admirable Southey.

  I love all Southey, and all that he does; and love that Correspondence of his with Caroline Bowles.

  The second to come was a comely man, right manly in his going; and when the true-men were brought to speak of him there was quarrelling in their companies, for he had kinsmen in both their camps, and loath were they to do battle with him. But those that knew him not dealt him many back-handed blows, and for every stroke he received he gave two others, and inch by inch he fought his way upward with his face kept steadfastly to the true-men and his back to the summit. And though the guard cut away both coif and laurel in the strife, yet because his kinsmen fought not against him but against their fellows to his behoof, therefore he prevailed and won the heights.

  His prose style is the most uniformly good of any English writer who has written on anything like the same scale and with anything like the same variety of subject and class of work.

  Southey, like Dryden, is one of the manliest of writers. He is totally devoid of affectation; he has no mannerism, and expresses himself simply because he thinks clearly…. His prose-writings, no doubt, exhibit the weakness, as well as strength, of his nature. He acknowledges that he could not stand severe thought. There are subjects about which he knew little and wrote feebly; there are opinions scattered through his volumes at which we are forced to smile. When he prophesies he fails, just as Cobden fails, and as Mr. Bright fails; and when he touches on spiritual experiences that arouse no corresponding emotion in his own heart, there is an evident want of sympathy and breadth.

  Southey interested, but I cannot say that he in any way influenced me.

  Southey’s biographies mark the beginnings, and fix the character, of nineteenth-century prose. Less formal in structure and less rhetorical in vocabulary than the prose of the preceding era, it has gained in simplicity and directness, in artistic compression and reserve. Southey’s prose had none of the qualities which impress us in the prose of Gibbon, or which enchant and almost intoxicate us in that of Burke; but we feel, all the same, that neither Burke nor Gibbon could have turned their instrument of language to the purposes of a short biography with such mastery as Southey in the “Life of Nelson” displays in the use of his. Above all, we feel that a race of beings among whom mortal will always be more common than immortal writers have been supplied with an incomparably more useful model for imitation in the prose of Southey than in that of Gibbon or of Burke.

  Poetical criticism, whether of his own writings or of those of others, was one of Southey’s weakest points. But while egregiously deceived as to the absolute worth of his epics, he obeyed a happy instinct in selecting epic as his principal field in poetry. The gifts which he possessed—ornate description, stately diction, invention on a large scale—required an ample canvas for their display. Although the concise humour and simplicity of his lines on “The Battle of Blenheim” ensure it a place among the best known short poems in the language, there are not half a dozen of his lyrical pieces, some of his racy ballads excepted, that have any claim to poetic distinction. The “English Eclogues,” however, have an important place in literature as prototypes of Tennyson’s more finished performances, but are hardly poetry. As a writer of prose Southey is entitled to very high praise, although, as De Quincey justly points out, the universally commended elegance and perspicuity of his style do not make him a fine writer. But within his own limits he is a model of lucid, masculine English—“sinewy and flexible, easy and melodious.”