with what, as civilized men and partakers of the Christian inheritance, we are able to set in contrast with it, Islamism assumes quite another look and value. In the first place, created, as it was, under the pressure, and within the mould, so to speak, of a narrow physical conception of the universe, it wants that scientific transparency and largeness, without which it could now be a tenement for no cultivated mind, and which, not diminishing in the least its moral intensity, even a natural Theist might have succeeded in giving to it. In the Theism of Plato, Pagan and Polytheistic as it was, we see the earth hung like a dark ball in the midst of an azure universe, through which stars glitter at intervals, and round whose outer bosses the chariots of the gods career. In the Theism of Mahomet, on the other hand, vastly more terrible on the conscience as it is than that of Plato, we seem to stand on a flat unspacious plain, down over which, and so near above us that we can scarcely breathe, there presses an impenetrable iron roof. Further, taking the higher view that still remains, and permitting ourselves for a moment the final contrast, where in Islamism-all its natural merits allowed for to the utmost-shall we find aught of that exquisite adaptation to the nature and necessities of man as a sinful and sin-loving being, by which Christianity is so wonderfully distinguished; aught of that transcendent reciprocation of offer on the one hand, and aspiration of free grace and human acceptance on the other, by which heaven and earth are brought nigh, and an invisible descending cone, as it were, is interposed, the basis of which is the whole face of the supernatural, and the apex of which is in the heart of man; aught, either, of that spirit of meekness and love which Christianity diffuses through life like a balm, and discharges on the world like a plenteous dew? Of the poverty of Islamism in all these respects, the present state of the Mahometan parts of the world is but too sad a confirmation. Many are the revolutions in the future to which the civilized man and the Christian ought to look forward with hope and desire; but of all these we know not one that should be more ardently expected than the dawn of a new day of power and progress on those patriarchal lands of the East wherein man was cradled, the rising of a new star especially for that little portion of them

"Over whose acres walked those blessed feet
That, eighteen hundred years ago, were nailed
For our advantage to the bitter cross."

Southey's Life and Correspondence.

225

ART. VII.-The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey. Edited by his Son, The Rev. CHARLES CUTHBERT SOUTHEY, M.A. Vols. 2 and 3. 1850.

SINCE our last publication two more volumes of Mr. Cuthbert Southey's Life of his father have appeared, and the interest of the work continues undiminished. Such letters of the poet as have fallen into his son's hands form almost the whole materials from which the narrative is framed. The letters, however, from which the son's narrative is put together, differ essentially from those published in the earlier part of the first volume, in which the poet endeavoured in advancing life to summon back his recollections of infancy and childhood. Such recollections are more or less vivid; but even where the affections are strongest and truest, the memory does not, cannot preserve the past. The picture is a fading one, and imagination is called in to perfect the outline or supply the colours. The process is not the less a process of the imaginative faculty that we are unconscious of any power but that of memory being called into active exercise; and we regard the portraits of Southey's uncles and aunts, and the heroes and heroines with whom he has peopled the dream-castles of his childhood with no more assured sense of their having had an existence in the world of realities than his Rodericks and Florindas, who, though the names be found in legends and chronicles, are the creations of the poet's mind as truly as the Ladarluds and Kailyals, who never had any other being than in romance. The pictures of Southey's relatives, given in his letters to Mr. May, affect us in precisely the same way as the Doctor Daniel Dove, and the Bhow Begum of the DOCTOR. The part of the work which more properly belongs to his son, is formed, as far as the work has yet gone, of letters written as the occasions of everyday life required, expressing, always very naturally and often very happily, such thoughts as the impulse of the passing moment suggested; the fixed opinions, too, of a man very opinionative, and often very unreasonably intolerant of all opposition, are repeated in letter after letter. These opinions are seldom enforced by anything that can be properly called argument, of which, indeed, Southey appears to have been himself, in any true sense of the word, incapable, and of which from others he would seem to have been singularly impatient. Even in his formal works, and in the case of questions which demanded careful investigation and examination of principles, Southey assisted those who sought to form a judgment for themselves rather by accumulating authorities from old writers than by bringing the

VOL. XIII. NO. XXV.

P

powers of an original thinker to the inquiry. In his letters it was not to be expected that powers of mind which had not been exhibited in his works should appear. Southey's best letters are those which are occupied with literary gossip, and unluckily for Mr. Cuthbert Southey's book, of this class of letters we find more in Mr. Robberds' Life of William Taylor, and in Sir Egerton Brydges' Autobiography, than he has as yet been able to give us. In the letters to Taylor and to Brydges we have-as also in those to his friends Bedford and Wynn, which are found in Cuthbert Southey's book-in addition to the opinionativeness never at any time absent, that which gives its true charm to Southey's correspondence and to much of his poetry-" the thousand phantasies unsought and undetained" that pass over the mind in a state of dreamy half-consciousness when it can scarcely be described as fully occupied or entirely active, when it is not so much thinking as playing with thoughts. But all Southey's letters, in whatever tone or temper they are written, to whomever or on whatever subject, are illustrative of the peaceful tenor of a fully occupied life; there is no effort in any of them-no display of any kind-no affectation. Those in the second and third volumes of "The Life and Correspondence" are in actual contrast with the autobiographical letters, and if it were not that the business of a man occupied with literature can scarcely be without interest to a very large class of readers, would have no better claim to publication than ordinary business letters. As it is we think they have been published at too great length. The mere fact that a letter has been written by Southey is not an adequate reason for its being printed. The fact that a letter was originally private-was written confidentially, is surely a reason why it should not be published; and though there may be easily imagined quite sufficient reasons to overweigh these considerations, yet it is for the person who prints private letters to make out such a case. The biographers of every man whose name is familiar to the public are sure to imagine that whatever relates to him has to all men an abiding interest, and if there be nothing to give offence to men still living, and, indeed, very often whether there be or not, every idle word becomes fixed in permanent and ineffaceable record. In one volume of biography, which we have been lately looking over, the bill of the upholsterer who furnished a poet's cottage is printed; in another a washer-woman's accounts and a tailor's day-books occupy pages upon pages; a third, mentioning a gentleman's marriage, gives three letters stating the fact, and nothing but the fact, which had never been a subject of dispute or doubt, and not content with this, adds an extract from a local newspaper, and a copy of the entry in the parish register. Why all this? Does it not

Discretion desirable in Biographers.

227

occur to the persons engaged in biography that the shorter and the more simple the annals, the nearer they are to what it must be presumed is their chief purpose-the preservation of an enduring record of the deceased. Books may easily be made too long to be read at all; and it is scarcely fair to the fame of Southey, already oppressed with the weight of his own works, to increase the burthen by volume after volume, of whatever in his toil for daily bread he may have set down in his journals, much of which must have been merely as aids to his own memory, aids of a kind which every man who has to write for the public must use and more of it, in all probability, as an index of reference to such books as he found it necessary to consult.

The biographer of Southey may, however, regard one of the questions which we have mooted as decided for him by the poet himself. When the Life of William Taylor was about to be published Southey gave to Mr. Robberds such letters of Taylor's as were in his possession, in order that both parts of the correspondence should be published. Their letters were chiefly on literary subjects. There was both in his letters, and in Taylor's, something to communicate which many would be glad to learn. There was a good deal respecting his own and Taylor's studies. And if there was now and then the mention of some incident interesting to them alone, such interruption occurred but rarelyso rarely, indeed, that on the whole we think it was wise, if the letters were published at all, that they should be published without abridgment. With Mr. Robberds we had but one fault to find-the letters refer very often to proposed alterations of passages in manuscript poems, and without the poems it is impossible to understand the criticism. In some cases the poems were never printed, in others the printed poem so differs from what it was in manuscript that the passages referring to it in its former state cease to have any application. Such letters should surely have been omitted, or notes given, which would have been the true course, whenever the Editor had the opportunity of thus rendering the meaning clear.

We have, in our last Number, transcribed a sentence from a letter of Coleridge's, describing to Southey the scenery at Keswick, and the house which was to be his future home. In another letter Coleridge again endeavours to paint the landscape or landscapes; and Southey himself has frequently done all that can be done by words to bring it before the eye. In writing to Mr. Wedgewood, Coleridge says, "The room in which I write commands six distinct landscapes-the two lakes, the vale, the river; and mountains and mists, and clouds and sunshine make endless combinations, as if heaven and earth were for ever talking to each other. Often when in a deep study I have

walked to the window, and remained there, looking without seeing, all at once the lake of Keswick and the mountains of Borrowdale at the head of it, have entered into my mind with a suddenness as if I had been snatched out of Cheapside and placed for the first time in the spot where I stood; and that is a delightful feeling these fits and starts of novelty received from a long known object. The river Greta flows behind our house, roaring like an untamed son of the hills, then winds round and glides away in the front, so that we live in a peninsula. But besides this ethereal eye-feeding, we have very substantial conveniences. Our garden is part of a large nursery garden, which is the same to us and as private as if the whole had been our own, and then, too, we have delightful walks without passing our garden gates."

In September 1803, Southey, after negotiating for a house in Wales which some accidental circumstance interrupted, went to take up what was intended to be a temporary abode at Greta Hall, the house described in those letters of Coleridge which we have quoted, and which was then the residence of Coleridge. Some sad changes had taken place in his family during the past year. His letters mention the death of his mother, and of his first and—then—his only child.

*

"We had been suffering for twelve hours, and the moment of her [his mother's] release was welcome: like one whose limb has been just amputated he feels the immediate ceasing of acute suffering; the pain of the wound soon begins, and the sense of the loss continues through life. I calmed and curbed myself, and forced myself to employment; but at night there was no sound of feet in her bedroom, to which I had been used to listen, and in the morning it was not my first business to see her. I had used to carry her her food, for I could persuade her better than any one else to the act of swallowing it. * * I have now lost all the friends of my infancy and childhood. The whole recollections of my first ten years are connected with the dead. There lives no one who can share them with me. It is losing so much of one's existence. I have not been yielding to, or rather indulging grief; that would have been folly. I have read, written, talked : Bedford has been often with me and kindly. When I saw her after death, Wynn, the whole appearance was so much that of utter death that the first feeling was as if there could have been no world for the dead; the feeling was very strong, and it required thought and reasoning to recover my former certainty, that as surely we must live hereafter as all here is not the creation of folly or of chance."

Southey's first letter on his arrival at Keswick was to his brother Thomas, then a Lieutenant in the navy, and with whom he at all times kept up an affectionate correspondence. The death of his child was then a recent grief.