among the historians, if I live to complete the works upon yonder shelves:'-which most unhappily he did not.

Every generation has a pet poet or two of its own; and the generation which had now arisen worshipped a Muse instinct with amorous or personal passion,-a Muse of a very different order from Southey's. His Clio, even in his first youth, had administered a scornful rebuke when he uttered a few words that seemed akin to sentimental softness :

'I spake, when Lo!
There stood before me in her majesty
Clio, the strong-eyed Muse. Upon her brow
Sate a calm anger. Go, young man, she cried,
Sigh among myrtle bowers, and let thy soul
Effuse itself in strains so sorrowful sweet,
That lovesick maids may weep upon thy page
Soothed with delicious sorrow.'

That was not the way he went; but in his own way and in some of his poems-certainly in Roderick-passion, though governed and severe, and couchant, as it were, in the language of reserve, is by no means wanting; and how far it would be a mistake to assume that, because he was of a happy and cheerful temperament, he was a stranger to imaginative emotion, may be gathered from what he says of himself in a letter to Landor:-"You wonder that I can think of two poems at once. It proceeds from weakness, not from strength. I could not stand the continuous excitement which you have gone through in your tragedy : in me it would not work itself off in tears; the tears would flow while in the act of composition, and would leave behind a throbbing head and a whole system in the highest state of nervous exciteability, which would soon induce disease in one of its most fearful forms. From such a state I recovered in 1800 by going to Portugal and suddenly changing climate, occupation, and all internal objects; and I have kept it off since by a good intellectual regimen '.' How much reason he had to be careful was shown by the disease of the brain which followed his domestic calamities, and brought his literary life to a close at sixty-five years of age.

Of poetic passion then there was enough and to spare in his nature, though he took no pleasure in it, or none which he could afford to indulge. But along with this there was an imaginative vehe

1 Life and Letters, vol. iii. p. 300.

mence and power partaking of passion, which, on one occasion at least, he did not care to keep within the bounds of his 'intellectual regimen.' He had a passionate hatred of Bonaparte, growing out of moral as well as political and patriotic feelings, and no doubt exasperated by the antagonism of those who fell down in worship before the wonders of his success. Wordsworth has told us,

'How an accurséd thing it is to gaze

On prosperous tyrants with a dazzled eye,’—

and on one of the two occasions on which Southey and Byron met, Bonaparte was spoken of; and when Byron gave some indications of the dazzled eye, Southey replied that Bonaparte was ‘a mean tyrant.' But his meanness was by no means the worst part of him. Some of his political murders, secret or avowed, were regarded by Southey (justly, may it not be said?) as private and personal crimes for which it was right that, when circumstances rendered it possible, he should be made to answer with his life. He writes to Landor (9th March 1814),- For five years I have been preaching the policy, the duty, the necessity, of declaring Bonaparte under the ban of human nature.' These feelings and opinions gave birth to the Ode written during the Negociations for Peace in 1814; and since Milton's immortal imprecation,

'Avenge, oh Lord, thy slaughtered Saints whose bones

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold'..

there has been no occasional poem equal to it in grandeur and power. Nor any indeed equal to it in art; witness the expressive change of tone and temper when, at the fifth line of the third stanza, the denunciations are arrested for a few moments, and a vision arises of what the tyrant's career might have been had he chosen the better part.

Occasional poems on great public events are very rarely great poems. The facts are too strong for the imaginative effects, and take the place of them. But there is one other of Southey's,— that on the death of the Princess Charlotte,-with the grace and beauty of which no facts could compete.

Of the minor poems other than occasional, the varieties are too numerous to be even so much as indicated here; but some of them are examples of the humour, sometimes light_and playful, sometimes grotesque, which was strongly characteristic of Southey. Humour is an element which cannot but widen the field of a poet's

umor

imagination, though it has been utterly wanting in some of our greatest poets,-in Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as in Milton. It is commonly and perhaps correctly said to be the gift of a gloomy rather than of a cheerful temperament; and no doubt the humour which breaks through the clouds is the most enlarging and enriching :

The richest mirth, the richest sadness too,
Stands from a groundwork of its opposite;
For these extremes upon the way to meet
Take a wide sweep of Nature, gathering in
Harvests of sundry seasons.'

This was not Southey's kind; but his had a charm of its own.
Much of it belonged to his daily life, and it was often out of this
that it found its way into his poetry. His life was a singular
combination of gaiety with steady industry and laborious research.
Some trivial incident occurred, and his fireside was enlivened by
verses like those which follow1, almost conversational in their
easy pleasantry :—

Inscription for a Coffee-pot.

A golden medal was voted to me
By a certain Royal Society.

'Twas not a thing at which to scoff,

For fifty guineas were the cost thereof.

On the one side the head of the King you might see,

And on the other was Mercury.

But I was scant of worldly riches,

And moreover the Mercury had no breeches.

So, thinking of honour and utility too,

And having modesty also in view,

I sold the medal,-why should I not?

And with the money which for it I got

I purchased this silver coffee-pot;

Which I trust my son will preserve with care,

To be handed down from heir to heir.

These verses are engraven here,

That the truth of the matter may appear;

And I hope the Society will be so wise

As in future to dress their Mercuries.'

As to the place and rank to be assigned to Southey amongst the poetic souls of our literature, the time has hardly yet arrived for 1 I was at his fireside when they were written, and took a copy of them.

forming a judgment. 'Do not ask yourself,' he says in a letter to Ebenezer Elliot, 'what are the causes of the failure or success of your contemporaries; their failure or success is not determined yet; a generation, an age, a century, will not suffice to determine it'.' This is a truth to which past history will be found to testify. We read now with astonishment the opinion which Dryden, evidently conscious that he was flying in the face of prevailing sentiments, ventured to express, towards the end of the seventeenth century, about two poets who had written in the beginning of it: - For my own part, I consider Shakespeare equal to Ben Jonson, if not superior?

Southey's belief in his own posthumous renown has led some persons to call him conceited. In his youth he was sanguine and presumptuous; in his after-life sanguine and confident; at no time of life was he ever vain. He took great delight in his own works. Why should he not? Wordsworth once spoke to me of the value he had himself attached to ethical poetry as possibly excessive, but not on that account to be found fault with; inasmuch as it had given encouragement and animation to his endeavours. Southey in a letter to Grosvenor Bedford (Feb. 12, 1809) says,—' Young lady never felt more desirous to see herself in a new ball-dress than I do to see my own performances in print. There are a great many philosophical reasons for this fancy of mine, and one of the best of all reasons is, that I hold it good to make everything a pleasure which it is possible to make so.' And in a letter to me (April 13, 1829) twenty years later, he illustrates the same principle by a story of a Spaniard he had known who 'always put on his spectacles when he was about to eat cherries, that they might look the bigger and more tempting.'

He was not in the habit of guarding himself against misconstruction. Except on rare occasions, such as Lord Byron's invectives in the Press or those of Mr. W. Smith in the House of Commons, he left his character to take care of itself. He had a high opinion, especially in his earlier years, of his powers. He believed too in the high and permanent place which some portion of his work would take in the literature of his country. Such expectations are probably indulged by many young poets who make no mention of it. As abstinence is easier than moderation, and egoism in soliloquy than outspoken egoism, so is it not seldom the 1 Life and Letters, vol. iv. Jan. 30, 1819.

refuge of the weak. And whether the aspirants be weak or strong, their aspirations are not ignoble, and their hopes make them happy. If they succeed, the world is the better; if they fail, it is

no worse.

Whatever tendency to excess there may have been on Southey's part in the estimate of his own works will be found to prevail quite as much in his estimate of the works of his friends, or indeed of many other works, old and new, which he approved and admired. In a letter to me of Oct. 1829, he writes,-'A greater poet than Wordsworth there never has been nor ever will be.' And if he expected for himself a larger measure of attention from posterity than may now seem likely to be accorded him, it should be remembered, that though as long as his mind lasted he 'lived laborious days' for the sake of his family and of others whom, in the generosity of his heart, he helped to support, yet all the labours of all the days did not enable him to do more than make preparations for the three great works which it was the object and ambition of his life to accomplish.

Of what he did accomplish, a portion will not soon be forgotten. 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.

HENRY TAYLOR.