wonder. The skiff-boat neard : I heard them talk, That signal made but now ?' Approacheth 'Strange, by my faith!' the Hermit saidthe ship with ' And they answer'd not our cheer! Dear Lord ! it hath a fiendish look'- And straight a sound was heard. The ship sud- Under the water it rumbled on, denly sink Still louder and more dread : The ship went down like lead. Like one that hath been seven days drown'd eth. Pilot's boat. Upon the whirl, where sank the ship, Mariner 6 I moved my lips—the Pilot shriek'd earnestly entreateth “Say quick, quoth he, ' I bid thee say the Hermit to What manner of man art thou ?' shrieve him; and the peForthwith this frame of mine was wrench'd nance of life falls on him. With a woful agony, Which forced me to begin my tale ; And then it left me free. Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns ; throughout And till my ghastly tale is told, and agony This heart within me burns. constraineth him to travel from land to I pass, like night, from land to land; land; And ever his future life O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been O sweeter than the marriage-feast, And youths and maidens gay! To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! love and He prayeth well who loveth well all things Both man and bird and beast. reverence to that God inade and loveth. He prayeth best, who loveth best [ROBERT SOUTHEY was born at Bristol on Aug. 12, 1774. He was educated at Westminster School and at Balliol College, Oxford ; and after some years of wandering and unsettlement he went to live, in 1803, at Greta Hall, near Keswick, which remained his home till his death in 1843. In 1813 he was made poet laureate. Besides his countless prose works, his volumes of verse were very numerous; the chief of them are:-Poems by Robert Lovell and Robert Southey, of Balliol College, Oxford, 2 vols., 1795-9; Joan of Arc, 1796; Poems, 1797; Thalaba the Destroyer, 1801; Madoc, 1805; Metrical Tales and other Poems, 1805; The Curse of Kehama, 1810 ; Roderick, the last of the Goths, 1814; A Vision of Judgment, 1821.] a In the year 1837, two years before his brain softened and his mind went to ruin, Southey superintended a collective edition of his poems in ten volumes. Of his five narrative poems, Joan of Arc, written at nineteen years of age (1793-94), was, in his own just estimation, the least worthy to succeed ; and yet it gave him what he calls a ‘Baxter's shove into his right place in the world.' Thalaba came next; "the wild and wondrous song ;' delightful in its kind, as a Tale of the Arabian Nights is delightful; but wanting, as all stories in which supernatural agencies play a leading part must be, in one sort of charm,—that which results from a sense of art exercised in the fulfilment of a law. For when the law of Nature is set aside, the poet's fancy may ‘wander at its own sweet will.' To a poem thus lawless in its incidents and accidents, Southey thought that a rythmic structure of blank verse almost equally lawless was appropriate. He does not deny that regular blank verse is superior ; he says of it in one of his prefaces,—' Take it in all its gradations, from the elaborate rhythm of Milton, down to its loosest structure in the early dramatists, I believe there is no measure comparable to it, either in our own or in any other a language, for might, and majesty, and flexibility and compass.' In that beloved solitude ! Flow with cool current o'er his cheek? With lids half closed he lies, Dreaming of days to come. Now licks his listless hand; Book III. 17. Southey in his school-days at Westminster had conceived the design of founding a poem on each of the more important mythologies known to the world. Thalaba was founded on the Mahometan ; and Kehama followed, founded on the Hindoo. For Kehama he had less expectation of success, inasmuch as it rambles farther still beyond the range of human sympathies. It had an advantage, however, of which he seems to have been unconscious,--that of being in rhyme. This he valued by its cost to himself, which was apparently next to nothing ; he says in a letter to me that 'rhyme suggests more thoughts than it baulks ;' but it is to rhyme probably that the greater success of Kehama was owing In the one poem, as well as in the other, though we are carried far and wide into other worlds than this, we meet from time to time with some penetrating insight into human life and nature as it exists here below : “Be of good heart, and may thy sleep be sweet, Ladurlad said ; . . . Alas! that cannot be To one whose days are days of misery. Ereenia, rescued in the dreams of night! |