as are also "The Well of St. Keyne," "Mary, the Maid of the Inn," "The Old Woman of Berkeley," "The Inchcape Rock," "Bishop Bruno," and others which are still remembered. Though Southey was never in a wide sense a popular poet, he was not wanting in tokens of public recognition. He was presented with the degree of LL.D. by the University of Oxford and offered a baronetcy by Sir Robert Peel. This latter he wisely declined, though he accepted a pension of £300 from the same source (1835). In 1837 Mrs. Southey died, and in 1839 he married Caroline Bowles, herself a graceful and pathetic writer of verse. The poet's later years were saddened by mental affliction involving loss of memory and inability to recognize his nearest and dearest friends. To use his own pathetically humorous words, "he began to die at the top." After long and painful weakness, he passed away on the 21st of March, 1843. Of Southey as a man it is difficult to speak too highly. His lofty morality, his pure integrity, his unselfish generosity, his stupendous industry, his unfailing courage, his simple affection, and his cheerful piety, mark him out as a giant among men-a beacon on the highway of life. The honorary labour he undertook on behalf of struggling talent or for the benefit of those who had been bereaved, was continuous and exacting. The volumes he edited and produced for the benefit of others, "The Works of Chatterton," "The Remains of Henry Kirke White," "The Poems of Robert Anderson," etc., etc., would form a creditable list for any ordinary man; while the brotherly generosity shown by him to the families of his friends Coleridge and Lovell, and the readiness with which he placed the whole of his savings, some £625, at the disposal of his friend, John May, in a time of need, show him to have preserved the spirit of the Pantisocracy through all the changes of life and opinion of the intervening years. Southey's high sense of duty and purity of heart led him to place the good before the great, or rather to deem goodness the highest form of greatness; to quote his friend, Sir Henry Taylor, "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" (Ward's "English Poets"). 16 Southey's prose works, by which he will be best remembered, include a "Life of Nelson; " a "Life of John Wesley;" "The Book of the Church;" a 'History of the Peninsular War;" a History of Brazil; "The Doctor" (an extraordinary miscellany); "Essays, Moral and Political;" Lives of Cromwell and Bunyan, as well as works on Sir Thomas More, Cowper, Chatterton, and Kirke White. These were more successful in finding a public, and some of them will hold their places as English classics. Southey's poetry gives ample evidence of many of the qualities that go to make a great poet, and it is to be regretted that his choice of subject and the necessity for his continued literary application prevented him doing justice to the powers he undoubtedly possessed. Professor Dowden, in his " Southey' ("English Men of Letters" series), says, "On the whole, judged by the highest standards, Southey's poetry takes a mid-most rank; it neither renders into art a great body of thought and passion, nor does it give faultless expression to lyrical moments. But it is the out-put of a large and vigorous mind, amply stored with knowledge; its breath of life is the moral ardour of a nature strong and generous, and therefore it can never cease to be of worth." Though cherishing high poetic ambition, it was not as a poet but as an historian that he expected to be remembered, and had he but lived to complete his Histories of Portugal, of English Literature, and the Monastic Orders he might have gained the object of his ambition. He had strong imagination, and powers of description equal to its requirements, as well as all a poet's art in putting what he had to say; but he lacked dramatic power, and was deficient in the sensuous and passionate elements without which imagination is apt to be hard and description cold, and by which alone the poet reaches that "touch of nature" which not only "makes the whole world kin," but brings all time into sympathy. ALFRED H. MILES. SHORTER POEMS. ROBERT SOUTHEY. I. THE BATTLE OF BLENHEIM. 1798. T was a summer evening, IT Old Kaspar's work was done, And he, before his cottage door, Was sitting in the sun; And by him sported on the green, Roll something large and round, In playing there, had found; He came to ask what he had found, Old Kaspar took it from the boy, Who stood expectant by; And then the old man shook his head, "'Tis some poor fellow's skull," said he, "I find them in my garden, for There's many hereabout; And often, when I go to plough, The ploughshare turns them out! For many thousand men," said he, "Were slain in that great victory." "Now tell us what 'twas all about," And what they fought each other for?" "It was the English," Kaspar cried, "My father lived at Blenheim then, Yon little stream hard by ; They burnt his dwelling to the ground, And he was forced to fly; So with his wife and child he fled, Nor had he where to rest his head. "With fire and sword the country round Was wasted far and wide, And many a childing mother then And new-born baby died; But things like that, you know, must be At every famous victory. "They say it was a shocking sight, After the field was won; For many thousand bodies here Lay rotting in the sun; But things like that, you know, must be After a famous victory. |