.

Gothic, to vary his rhythmic effects. English itself is a language derived from divers roots, and therefore, if competently dealt with, the more capable of composite and contrasted melodies. But auxiliaries from even one alien tongue may de excellent service; as Milton well knew when he sounded his roll-call of devils in the first book of Paradise Lost. The concluding lines of the passage which follows will exemplify the advantage taken by Southey of Spanish names in Roderick:

So saying Adosinda left the King

Alone amid the ruins. There he stood,
As when Elisha, on the further bank
Of Jordan, saw that elder prophet mount
The fiery chariot, and the steeds of fire,
Trampling the whirlwind, bear him up the sky:
Thus gazing after her did Roderick stand;
And as the immortal Tishbite left behind
His mantle and prophetic powers, even so
Had her inspiring presence left infused

The spirit which she breathed. Gazing he stood
As at a Heavenly visitation there

Vouchsafed in mercy to himself and Spain;
And when the heroic mourner from his sight
Had passed away, still reverential awe

Held him suspended there and motionless.

Then, turning from the ghastly scene of death,
Up murmuring Lona, he began toward

The holy Bierzo his obedient way.

Sil's ample stream he crossed, where thro' the vale

Of Orras, from that sacred land it bears

The whole collected waters; northward then,
Skirting the heights of Aguiar, he reached

That consecrated pile amid the wild
Which sainted Fructuoso in his zeal
Reared to St. Felix, on Visonia's banks.'

Roderick, IV.

The picturesque element enters largely into Roderick; and in poems of such length, descriptions of natural scenery are invaluable as resting-places. Rest from action and passion,-rest even from intellectual effort, -cannot be dispensed with after prolonged strains in one or another mood of emotion or exaltation; nor is it to be obtained in any better way than by occupying the mind's eye with natural beauty and the mind's ear with the gentle melodies

by which it is most aptly accompanied. This exercise of art is nowhere more conspicuous than in Roderick.

Of minor poems Southey wrote many more than he had any desire to write. And how he came to write them is easily explained. In his first youth he says he often walked the streets for want of a dinner, not having eighteen pence for the ordinary nor bread and cheese at his lodgings. After twenty-one years of age he had a family to provide for, as well as certain relatives whom he could not allow to suffer from penury, though some of them may have deserved so to suffer. In 1835, when he was sixty-one years of age, he writes to Sir R. Peel (in a letter declining the offer of a baronetcy 2), 'Last year for the first time in my life I was provided with a year's expenditure beforehand.' Under such circumstances, much as it may have been his desire to write only from impulse and aspiration, it was his duty to write for money too. In his earlier years minor poems were marketable; A large proportion of his ballads and metrical tales were written for the Morning Post at a guinea a week; and when they were republished in a book, it was still for money, and with the motto, Nos haec novimus esse nihil.' There was no humiliation in this, and he knew that there was none. When he found his means again failing in 1807, he writes that, if necessary, he will seek nore review employment, write in more magazines, and scribble verses for the newspapers; adding, as long as I can keep half ny time for labours worthy of myself and of posterity I shall not teel debased by sacrificing the other, however unworthily it may be employed. And the fact is that, laborious and exuberant as he was from first to last, the great works which he was always longing and preparing, and in his sanguine heart hoping, to accomplish,— the history of Portugal, the history of English Literature, and the history of the Monastic Orders,—were postponed again and again and for ever.

As time passed on, his poetry, whether written for the market or not, became less saleable; and in 1820 he writes to Landor,My poems hang on hand. I want no monitor to tell me it is time to leave off. I shall force myself to finish what I have begun, and then- good night. Had circumstances favoured I might have done more in this way, and better. But I have done enough to be remembered among pocts, though my proper place will be

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 sonie 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 1.' 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

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

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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 offer. 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 follow', 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

I was at his fireside when they were written, and took a copy of them