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Southey had been careless of her own interests about money when she married him, and had sought no protection for her own property. When there was manifestly no hope of her husband's mind ever recovering, his brother assembled the family and other witnesses, and showed them a kind of will which he had drawn up, by which Mrs. Southey's property was returned to herself, intact.
To-day I will write about Robert Southey, and, as he and Coleridge married sisters, you may claim a distant relationship with him. His personal character was beautiful and unselfish, and his dwelling at Keswick was the home that for years sheltered Coleridge's children.
'I was used To sleep at nights as sweetly as a child, Now if the wind blew rough, it made me start, And think of my poor boy tossing about Upon the roaring seas. And then I seemed To feel that it was hard to take him from me For such a little fault. SOUTHEY.
The great physical strength which is commonly the basis of great mental vigour was not ruined in Tennyson by poverty and passion, as in the case of Burns, nor in forced literary labour, as in those of Scott and Dickens. For long he was poor, like Wordsworth and Southey, but never destitute. He made his early effort: he had his time of great sorrow, and trial, and apparent failure.
The torrent of knocks roared louder, slightly failed upon the ear, made a crescendo, emulated Niagara, surpassed that very American effort of nature, wavered, faltered to Lodore, died away to a feeble tittup like water dropping from a tap to flagstones, rose again in a final spurt that would have made Southey open his dictionary for adjectives, and drained away to death. The lady leaned back.
Scott doubled his work during the summer and autumn by undertaking the historical department, relinquished by Southey, of the Edinburgh Annual Register, yet the two Tales were ready in November, and appeared on the 1st of December 1816.
Southey, as we have seen, had the best opportunities of knowing him well; for a long journey together extending over many weeks, is, probably, better than anything else, calculated to bring out the weak as well as the strong points of a friend: indeed, many friendships have completely broken down under the severe test of a single week's tour.
He left Oatlands, and probably also, then or later, his official post at Court, and came to live in the Lake Country, where he had Robert Southey as his friend; it was at Keswick that he died, in 1811, and lies buried there far away from the grave of his wife in Weybridge Church.
Southey, who still held the laureate-ship in 1837, had faded out of life in 1843, and was succeeded in his once-despised office by William Wordsworth, who, with Rogers and Leigh Hunt and Moore, lived far into the new reign, uniting the Georgian and the Victorian school of writers.
To represent it as a reward commensurate with the merits of Wordsworth and Tennyson, or even of Southey, is to rate three first-class names in modern poetry on a level with the names of those third-rate "poetillos" who, during the eighteenth century, obtained the same reward for two intolerable effusions yearly.
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