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Updated: June 12, 2025
I behaved shabbily about some slight remarks which I was to have ventured on Mr. Southey's 'Madoc, in the 'Eclectic Review. On reading the critiques in the 'Edinburgh Review, on 'Thalaba' and 'Madoc, I found what were substantially my own impressions, so much better developed than I could have done, that I instantly threw my remarks away.
He then repaired to the parlour, bolted his food down his capacious throat in squares of three inches, answered ay and no at random to whatever question was asked at him, and again hurried back to the library, as soon as his napkin was removed, and sometimes with it hanging round his neck like a pinafore; How happily the days Of Thalaba went by!
But the longer poems, if they are ever to live, are still dry bones. Thalaba, one of the best, is spoilt by the dogged craze against rhyme, which is more, not less, needed in irregular than in regular verse. Joan of Arc, Madoc, Roderick, have not escaped that curse of blank verse which only Milton, and he not always, has conquered in really long poems.
Southey's mind, and the force of old habits of independent and unbridled thinking, which cannot be kept down even in addressing his Sovereign! Look at Mr. Southey's larger poems, his Kehama, his Thalaba, his Madoc, his Roderic. Who will deny the spirit, the scope, the splendid imagery, the hurried and startling interest that pervades them?
This morning Julian sat down in a little chair and took his father's foot on his lap. "I want to be papa's toadstool!" said Julian, making one of his funniest mistakes. My husband proposed reading "Thalaba." I was glad, though Southey is no favorite of mine. But I like to be familiar with such things, and to hear my husband's voice is the best music. Mrs. Sedgwick called to see us. 18th.
Robert Southey, the third member of this group, was a diligent worker, and one of the most voluminous of English writers. As a poet, he was lacking in inspiration, and his big oriental epics, Thalaba, 1801, and the Curse of Kehama, 1810, are little better than wax-work. Of his numerous works in prose, the Life of Nelson is, perhaps, the best, and is an excellent biography.
In social respects I had still more reason to be gratified. The days went by with me as smoothly as with Thalaba. My wife was all that I could wish. She was the very Julia whom I had married. Nay, she was something more something better. Her health improved, and with it her spirits. She evidently had no regrets. A sigh never escaped her. Her content and cheerfulness were wonderful.
How perfectly does Thalaba realize the ideal demanded in the Welsh Triad, of "fulness of erudition, simplicity of language, and purity of manners." But the critic was repelled by the purity of that delicious creation, more than attracted by the erudition which he must have respected, and the diction which he could not but admire
Again, would such a painter and forger have taken £40 for a thing, if authentic, worth £4000? Talma is not in the secret, for he had not even found out the rhymes in the first inscription. He is coming over with it, and my life to Southey's "Thalaba," it will gain universal faith. The letter is wanted, and I am wanted. Imagine the blank filled up with all kind things.
The next book opens with Thalaba lying distracted upon her grave, in the neighbourhood of which he had wandered, till "the sun, and the wind, and the rain, had rusted his raven locks"; and there he is found by the father of his bride, and visited by her ghost, and soothed and encouraged to proceed upon his holy enterprise.
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