SOUTHEY'S HARD WORK. 449 Wordsworth lived about fourteen miles off, at Mount Rydal, near Ambleside. Already his incessant industry had begun, but it now deepened into a life-long habit, until the busy brain wore itself out, and the workman could but wander without purpose and without power among the books, which he had gathered with patient love around the walls of his writing-room. Few events of any note, beyond the publication of his various works, marked the life of this busy author. In a letter to a friend he thus describes a day, and most of his days were similarly spent: "Three pages of history (of Portugal) after breakfast (equivalent to five in small quarto printing); then to transcribe and copy for the press, or to make any selections and biographies (for "Specimens of the British Poets"), or what else suits my humour till dinner-time. From dinner-time till tea I read, write letters, see the newspaper, and very often indulge in a siesta. After tea I go to poetry (he was now writing the "Curse of Kehama "), and correct and re-write and copy till I am tired; and then turn to anything else till supper. And this is my life." No wonder that a friend should say in deep astonishment, on hearing of such incessant toil, "But, Southey, tell me, when do you think?" We postpone for a little a notice of his various works. When Pye died in 1813, Southey received the Laurel which Scott had just declined. In 1821 Oxford conferred on him the degree of LL.D. A pension of £300 a year was granted to him in 1835 by Sir Robert Peel, who had already offered him a baronetcy. His first wife having died in 1837, he contracted a second marriage two years later with the poetess, Caroline Bowles, who was then an elderly lady of fifty-two, and whose four years of married life were given to the tendance of the poor Laureate, already, like the elm-tree pointed to by Swift-himself the saddest example of so terrible an end-beginning to die at the top. During the last three years of Southey's life his over-wrought mind was a total blank. He died at Greta on the 21st of March 1843. The poetry of Southey, though not of the very highest order, 450 66 THE CURSE OF KEHAMA." displays undoubted genius. His ambition as a poet was great; and few could have made more of the unmanageable themes he selected. Madoc, a Welshman's supposed discovery and conquest of Mexico (1805); The Curse of Kehama, a tale of the Hindoo mythology (1810); and Roderick, Last of the Goths, a blank-verse epic on early Spanish history (1814), are his principal poems, besides those already named. Among many others we may mention The Vision of Judgment, which provoked Byron's terribly sarcastic echo; and his latest efforts in verse, All for Love, and The Pilgrim of Compostella. His Lakist tendencies can best be observed in his minor poems and ballads, of which Lord William, Mary the Maid of the Inn, and The Old Woman of Berkeley are well-known specimens. "The Curse of Kehama" is his finest poem. In verse of most irregular music, but completely suited to his fantastic theme, he leads us to the terrestrial paradise, to the realms below the sea, -to the heaven of heavens, and, in a sublime passage, through adamantine rock, lit with a furnace glow, into Padalon, the Indian Hades. We follow the strange career of Kehama, a Hindoo rajah, who by penance and self-inflicted torture raises himself to a level with Brahma and Vishnu; we suffer with the poor mortal, who is burdened with the spell of a terrible curse laid on him by the enchanter, and we rejoice in his final deliverance and restoration to his family. Various Hindoo gods, a ghost, a benevolent spirit, and a woman, who receives immortality at the end, are among the dramatis personæ. Scenery and costume, situations and sentiments, are alike in keeping with the Oriental nature of the work. But, for all its splendour and all its correctness as a work of art, it is so far removed from the world in which our sympathies lie, that few can fully appreciate this noble poem, and perhaps none can return to it with never-wearied love, as to a play of Shakspere or a novel by Scott. Southey was a remarkable writer of English prose. His Life of Nelson (1813) is a model of its kind. Clear, polished, and thoroughly unstrained, a language flowed from his practised pen which few English writers have surpassed. A History of Brazil SOUTHEY'S PROSE WORKS. 451 (1st vol. 1810); Lives of John Wesley, Chatterton, Kirke White, and Cowper; a History of the Peninsular War (1st vol. 1823); Colloquies on Society (1829), a strange and not over-wise book, giving an account of conversations between Montesinos (Southey himself) and the ghost of Sir Thomas More, who visits him at Keswick; Lives of the British Admirals for Lardner's "Cyclopædia" (1833); and The Doctor (1834), stand out prominently amid a host of articles for the Quarterly, and occasional papers on almost every subject, which filled up the idle hours of this most indefatigable author. Like Johnson he was living from "hand to mouth," until a pension placed him above the fear of want; but he could not then give up the habits of incessant study and literary toil, which had grown to be his second nature. He was never so happy as when he sat amid his books, pen in hand, adding newly-written sheets to the pile of manuscript already lying in his copy-drawer. A VOYAGE THROUGH THE SKY. (FROM "KEHAMA.") Then in the ship of heaven Ereenia laid The waking, wondering maid; The ship of heaven, instinct with thought, displayed On either side, in wavy tide, The clouds of morn along its path divide; That bark, in shape, was like the furrowed shell Its hue?-Go watch the last green light 452 SPECIMEN OF SOUTHEY'S VERSE An angel's head, with visual eye, Recumbent there the maiden glides along How swift she feels not, though the swiftest wind Motionless as a sleeping babe she lay, And all serene in mind, Feeling no fear; for that ethereal air With such new life and joyance filled her heart, For sure she deemed her mortal part was o'er, Through air and sunshine sails the ship of heaven; Far, far beneath them lies The gross and heavy atmosphere of earth; The maid of mortal birth At every breath a new delight inhales. He furled his azure wings, which round him fold The happy Kailyal knew not where to gaze; WORDSWORTH was the great master of the Lake School,* in which Coleridge and Southey were also prominent members. Choosing thé simplest speech of educated Englishmen as a vehicle for the expression of their thoughts, and passing by with quiet scorn the used-up subjects of the Romancists—the military hero waving his red sword amid battle smoke; the assassin watching from the dark shadow of a vaulted doorway his unconscious victim, who strolls, singing in the white moonlight, down the empty street; the lover, "sighing like furnace with a woeful ballad made to his mistress's eyebrow," and kindred themes-the poets of the Lake School took their subjects often from among the commonest things, and wrote their poems in the simplest style. Bending a reverent ear to the mysterious harmonies of nature, to the ceaseless song of praise that rises from every blade of grass and every dewdrop, warbles in the fluting of every lark, and sweeps to heaven in every wave of air, they found in their own deep hearts a musical echo of that song, and shaping into words the swelling of their inward faith, they spoke to the world in a way to which the world was little used, about things in which the world saw no poetic beauty. The history of a hard-hearted hawker of earthenware and his ass, the adventures of Betty Foy's idiot son, and * The Lake School derived its name from the fact that its three most conspicuous members, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, lived chiefly by the English lakes. Originally a contemptuous name, it has gradually come to be the recognised title of Wordsworth and his disciples. |