FORECAST.

The printers ask if there is to be prefatory matter.

There shall be no excuses, nor any defensive explanations: and I shall only give here such forecast of this little book as may serve as a reminder, and appetizer, for the kindly acquaintances I meet once more; and further serve as an illustrative menu, for the benefit of those newer and more critical friends who browse tentatively at the tables of the booksellers.

This volume—the fourth in its series of English Lands and Letters—opens upon that always delightful country of hills and waters, which is known as the Lake District of England;—where we found Wordsworth, stalking over the fells—and where we now find the maker of those heavy[vi] poems of Thalaba and Madoc, and of the charming little biography of Nelson. There, too, we find that strange creature, De Quincey, full of a tumult of thoughts and language—out of which comes ever and anon some penetrating utterance, whose barb of words fixes it in the mind, and makes it rankle. Professor Wilson is his fellow, among the hills by Elleray—as strenuous, and weightier with his great bulk of Scottish manhood; the Isle of Palms is forgotten; but not “Christopher in his Shooting Jacket”—stained, and bespattered with Highland libations.

A Londoner we encounter—Crabb Robinson, full of gossip and conventionalities; and also that cautious, yet sometimes impassioned Scottish bard who sang of Hohenlinden, and of Gertrude of Wyoming. Next, we have asked readers to share our regalement, in wandering along the Tweed banks, and in rekindling the memories of the verse, the home, and the chivalric stories of the benign master of Abbotsford, for whom—whatever newer literary fashions may now claim allegiance and whatever historic quid-nuncs may say in derogation—I think there are great multitudes[vii] who will keep a warm place in their hearts and easily pardon a kindred warmth in our words.

After Dryburgh, and its pall, we have in these pages found our way to Edinboro’, and have sketched the beginners, and the beginnings of that great northern quarterly, which so long dominated the realm of British book-craft, and which rallied to its ranks such men as Jeffrey and the witty Sydney Smith, and Mackintosh and the pervasive and petulant Brougham—full of power and of pyrotechnics. These great names and their quarterly organ call up comparison with that other, southern and distinctive Quarterly of Albemarle Street, which was dressed for literary battle by writers like Gifford, Croker, Southey, and Lockhart.

The Prince Regent puts in an appearance in startling waistcoats and finery—vibrating between Windsor and London; so does the bluff Sailor-King William IV. Next, Walter Savage Landor leads the drifting paragraphs of our story—a great, strong man; master of classicism, and master of language; now tender, and now virulent; never quite master of himself.

[viii]

Of Leigh Hunt, and of his graceful, light-weighted, gossipy literary utterance, there is indulgent mention, with some delightful passages of verse foregathered from his many books. Of Thomas Moore, too, there is respectful and grateful—if not over-exultant—talk; yet in these swift days there be few who are tempted to tarry long in the “rosy bowers by Bendemeer.”

From Moore and the brilliant fopperies of “The First Gentleman of Europe,” we slip to the disorderly, but pungent and vivid essays of Hazlitt—to the orderly and stately historic labors of Hallam, closing up our chapter with the gay company who used to frequent the brilliant salon of the Lady Blessington—first in Seamore Place, and later at Gore House. There we find Bulwer, Disraeli (in his flamboyant youth-time), the elegant Count d’Orsay, and others of that train-band.

Following quickly upon these, we have asked our readers to fare with us along the old and vivid memories of Newstead Abbey—to track the master-poet of his time, through his early days of romance and marriage—through his journeyings[ix] athwart Europe, from the orange groves of Lisbon to the olives of Thessaly—from his friendship with Shelley, and life at Meillerie with its loud joys and stains—through his wild revels of Venice—his masterly verse-making—his quietudes of Ravenna (where the Guiccioli shone)—through his passionate zeal for Greece, and his last days at Missolonghi, with one brief glimpse of his final resting-place, beside his passionate Gordon mother, under the grim, old tower of Hucknall-Torkard. So long indeed do we dwell upon this Byronic episode, as to make of it the virtual pièce de résistance in the literary menu of these pages.

After the brusque and noisy King William there trails royally into view that Sovereign Victoria, over whose blanched head—in these very June days in which I write—the bells are all ringing a joyous Jubilee for her sixtieth year of reign. But to our eye, and to these pages, she comes as a girl in her teens—modest, yet resolute and calm; and among her advisers we see the suave and courtly Melbourne; and among those who make parliamentary battle, in the Queen’s young[x] years, that famed historian who has pictured the lives of her kinsfolk—William and Mary—in a way which will make them familiar in the ages to come.

We have a glimpse, too, of the jolly Captain Marryat cracking his for’castle jokes, and of the somewhat tedious, though kindly, G. P. R. James, lifting his chivalric notes about men-at-arms and knightly adventures—a belated hunter in the fields of ancient feudal gramarye.

And with this pennant of the old times of tourney flung to the sharp winds of these days, and shivering in the rude blasts—where anarchic threats lurk and murmur—we close our preface, and bid our readers all welcome to the spread of—what our old friend Dugald Dalgetty would call—the Vivers.

D. G. M.

Edgewood, June 24, 1897.

[xi]

CONTENTS.

[xiv]

[1]

CHAPTER I.

The reader will, perhaps, remember that we brought our last year’s ramble amongst British Lands and Letters to an end—in the charming Lake District of England. There, we found Coleridge, before he was yet besotted by his opium-hunger; there, too, we had Church-interview with the stately, silver-haired poet of Rydal Mount—making ready for his last Excursion into the deepest of Nature’s mysteries.

The reader will recall, further, how this poet and seer, signalized some of the later years of his life by indignant protests against the schemes—which[2] were then afoot—for pushing railways among the rural serenities of Westmoreland.

The Lake Country.

It is no wonder; for those Lake counties are very beautiful,—as if, some day, all the tamer features of English landscape had been sifted out, and the residue of picturesqueness and salient objects of flood and mountain had been bunched together in those twin regions of the Derwent and of Windermere. Every American traveller is familiar, of course, with the charming glimpses of Lake Saltonstall from the Shore-line high-road between New York and Boston; let them imagine these multiplied by a score, at frequently recurring intervals of walk or drive; not bald duplications; for sometimes the waters have longer stretch, and the hills have higher reach, and fields have richer culture and more abounding verdure; moreover, occasional gray church towers lift above the trees, and specks of villages whiten spots in the valleys; and the smoothest and hardest of roads run along the margin of the[3] lakes; and masses of ivy cover walls, and go rioting all over the fronts of wayside inns. Then, mountains as high as Graylock, in Berkshire, pile suddenly out of the quieter undulations of surface,

with high-lying ponds in their gulches; there are deep swales of heather, and bald rocks, and gray stone cairns that mark the site of ancient Cumbrian battles.

No wonder that a man loving nature and loving solitude, as Wordsworth did love them, should have demurred to the project of railways, and have shuddered—as does Ruskin now—at the whistling of the demon of civilization among those hills. But it has come there, notwithstanding, and come to stay; and from the station beyond Bowness, upon the charmingest bit of Windermere, there lies now only an early morning’s walk to the old home of Wordsworth at Rydal. Immediately thereabout, it is true, the levels are a little more puzzling to the engineers, so that the thirteen miles of charming country road which stretch thence—twirling hither and yon, and up and down—in a northwesterly direction to the town of Keswick and the Derwent valley, remain[4] now in very much the same condition as when I walked over them, in leisurely way, fifty odd years ago this coming spring. The road in passing out from Rydal village goes near the cottage where poor Hartley Coleridge lived, and earlier, that strange creature De Quincey (of whom we shall have presently more to say); it skirts the very

margin of Grasmere Lake; this latter being at your left, while upon the right you can almost see among the near hills the famous “Wishing Gate;” farther on is Grasmere village, and Grasmere church-yard—in a corner of which is the grave of the old poet, and a modest stone at its head on which is graven only the name, William Wordsworth,—as if anything more were needed! A mile or two beyond, one passes the “Swan Inn,” and would like to lodge there, and maybe clamber up Helvellyn, which here shows its great hulk on the right—no miniature mountain, but one which would hold its own (3,000 feet) among the lesser ones which shoulder up the horizon at “Crawford’s,” in the White Mountains.

Twirling and winding along the flank of Helvellyn, the road comes presently upon the long[5] Dunmail Rise, where a Cumbrian battle was fought, and where, some six hundred feet above the level of Rydal water, one plunges into mountain savagery. All the while Helvellyn is rising like a giant on the right, and on the left is the lake of Thirlmere, with its shores of precipice. An hour more of easy walking brings one to another crest of hill from which the slope is northward and westward, and from this point you catch sight of the great mass of Skiddaw; while a little hitherward is the white speckle of Keswick town; and stretching away from it to your left lies all the valley of Derwent Water—with a cleft in the hills at its head, down which the brooklet of Lodore comes—“splashing and flashing.”

Robert Southey.

I have taken the reader upon this stroll through a bit of the Lake country of England that we might find the poet Dr. Southey[1] in his old[6] home at Keswick. It is not properly in the town, but just across the Greta River, which runs southward of the town. There, the modest but good-sized house has been standing for these many years upon a grassy knoll, in its little patch of quiet lawn, with scattered show of trees—but never so many as to forbid full view up the long stretch of Derwent Water. His own hexameters shall tell us something of this view:

This may be very true picturing; but it has not the abounding flow of an absorbing rural enthusiasm; there is too sharp a search in it for the assonance,[7] the spondees and the alliteration—to say nothing of the mineralogy. Indeed, though Southey loved those country ways and heights, of which I have given you a glimpse, and loved his daily walks round about Keswick and the Derwent, and loved the bracing air of the mountains—I think he loved these things as the feeders and comforters of his physical rather than of his spiritual nature. We rarely happen, in his verse, upon such transcripts of out-of-door scenes as are inthralling, and captivate our finer senses; nor does he make the boughs and blossoms tell such stories as filtered through the wood-craft of Chaucer.

Notwithstanding this, it is to that home of Southey, in the beautiful Lake country, that we must go for our most satisfying knowledge of the man. He was so wedded to it; he so loved the murmur of the Greta; so loved his walks; so loved the country freedom; so loved his workaday clothes and cap and his old shoes;[2] so loved his books—double-deep[8] in his library, and running over into hall and parlor and corridors; loved, too, the children’s voices that were around him there—not his own only, but those always next, and almost his own—those of the young Coleridges. These were stranded there, with their mother (sister of Mrs. Southey), owing to the rueful neglect of their father—the bard and metaphysician. I do not think this neglect was due wholly to indifference. Coleridge sidled away from his wife and left her at Keswick in that old home of his own,—where he knew care was good—afraid to encounter her clear, honest, discerning—though unsympathetic—eyes, while he was putting all resources and all subterfuges to the feeding of that opiate craze

which had fastened its wolfish fangs upon his very soul.

And Southey had most tender and beautiful care for those half-discarded children of the “Ancient Mariner.” He writes in this playful vein to young Hartley (then aged eleven), who is away on a short visit:

“Mr. Jackson has bought a cow, but he has had no calf since you left him. Edith [his own daughter] grows like[9] a young giantess, and has a disposition to bite her arm, which you know is a very foolish trick. Your [puppy] friend Dapper, who is, I believe, your God-dog, is in good health, though he grows every summer graver than the last. I am desired to send you as much love as can be enclosed in a letter. I hope it will not be charged double on that account at the post-office. But there is Mrs. Wilson’s love, Mr. Jackson’s, your Aunt Southey’s, your Aunt Lovell’s and Edith’s; with a purr from Bona Marietta [the cat], an open-mouthed kiss from Herbert [the baby], and three wags of the tail from Dapper. I trust they will all arrive safe. Yr. dutiful uncle.”

And the same playful humor, and disposition to evoke open-eyed wonderment, runs up and down the lines of that old story of Bishop Hatto and the rats; and that other smart slap at the barbarities of war—which young people know, or ought to know, as the “Battle of Blenheim”—wherein old Kaspar says,—

Almost everybody has encountered these Southeyan verses, and that other, about Mary the “Maid of the Inn,” in some one or other of the many “collections” of drifting poetry. There are very few, too, who have not, some day, read that most engaging little biography of Admiral Nelson, which tells, in most straightforward and simple and natural way, the romantic story of a life full of heroism, and scored with stains. I do not know, but—with most people—a surer and more lasting memory of Southey would be cherished by reason of those unpretending writings already named, and by knowledge of his quiet, orderly, idyllic home-life among the Lakes of Cumberland—tenderly and wisely provident of the mixed household committed to his care—than by the more ambitious things he did, or by the louder life he lived in the controversialism and politics of the day.

[11]

His Early Life.

To judge him more nearly we must give a slight trace of his history. Born down in Bristol (in whose neighborhood we found, you will remember, Chatterton, Mistress More, Coleridge, and others)—he was the son of a broken down linen-draper, who could help him little; but a great aunt—a starched woman of the Betsey Trotwood stamp—could and did befriend him, until it came to her knowledge, on a sudden, that he was plotting emigration to the Susquehanna, and plotting marriage with a dowerless girl of Bristol; then she dropped him, and the guardian aunt appears nevermore.

An uncle, however, who is a chaplain in the British service, helps him to Oxford—would have had him take orders—in which case we should have had, of a certainty, some day, Bishop Southey; and probably a very good one. But he has some scruples about the Creed, being over-weighted, perhaps, by intercourse with young Coleridge on the side of Unitarianism: “Every[12] atom of grass,” he says, “is worth all the Fathers.”[3] He, however, accompanies the uncle to Portugal; dreams dreams and has poetic visions there in the orange-groves of Cintra; projects, too, a History of Portugal—which project unfortunately never comes to fulfilment. He falls in with the United States Minister, General Humphreys, who brings to his notice Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan,” which Southey is good enough to think “has some merit.”

Thereafter he comes back to his young wife; is much in London and thereabout; coming to know Charles Lamb, Rogers, and Moore, with other such. He is described at that day as tall—a most presentable man—with dark hair and eyes, wonderful arched brows; “head of a poet,” Byron said; looking up and off, with proud foretaste of the victories he will win; he has, too, very early, made bold literary thrust at that old story of Joan of Arc: a good topic, of large human interest, but not over successfully dealt with by him. After this came that extraordinary poem of[13] Thalaba, the first of a triad of poems which excited great literary wonderment (the others being the Curse of Kehama and Madoc). They are rarely heard of now and scarcely known. Beyond that fragment from Kehama, beginning

hardly a page from either has drifted from the high sea of letters into those sheltered bays where the makers of anthologies ply their trade. Yet no weak man could have written either one of these almost forgotten poems of Southey; recondite learning makes its pulse felt in them; bright fancies blaze almost blindingly here and there; old myths of Arabia and Welsh fables are galvanized and brought to life, and set off with special knowledge and cumbrous aids of stilted and redundant prosody; but all is utterly remote from human sympathies, and all as cold—however it may attract by its glitter—as the dead hand

which holds the magic taper in the Dom Daniel cavern of Thalaba.

[14]

A fourth long poem—written much later in life—Roderick the Goth, has a more substantial basis of human story, and so makes larger appeal to popular interest; but it had never a marked success.

Meantime, Southey has not kept closely by London; there have been peregrinations, and huntings for a home—for children and books must have a settlement. Through friends of influence he had come to a fairly good political appointment in Ireland, but has no love for the bulls and blunderbusses which adorn life there; nor will he tutor his patron’s boys—which also comes into the scale of his duties—so gives up that chance of a livelihood. There is, too, a new trip to Portugal with his wife; and a new reverent and dreamy listening to the rustle of the shining leaves of the orange-trees of Cintra. I do not think those murmurous tales of the trees of Portugal, burdened with old monastic flavors, ever went out of his ears wholly till he died. But finally the poet does come to settlement, somewhere about 1803—in that Keswick home, where we found him at the opening of our chapter.

[15]

Greta Hall.

Coleridge is for awhile a fellow-tenant with him there, then blunders away to Grasmere—to London, to Highgate, and into that over-strained, disorderly life of which we know so much and yet not enough. But Southey does not lack self-possession, or lack poise: he has not indeed so much brain to keep on balance; but he thinks excellently well of his own parts; he is disgusted when people look up to him after his Irish appointment—“as if,” he said, “the author of Joan of Arc, and of Thalaba, were made a great man by scribing for the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”