pathetic picture drawn by another great man.* “The good man—­he was now getting old, towards sixty perhaps, and gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment.  Brow and head were round and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute.  The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration, confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment.  The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute, expressive of weakness under possibility of strength . . . a heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much suffering man.”

Carlyle.

And yet to this broken-down giant men crowded eagerly to hear him talk.  Never, perhaps, since the great Sam had held his court had such a talker been heard.  And although there was no Boswell near to make these conversations live again, the poet’s nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge, gathered some of his sayings together into a book which he called Table Talk.  With his good friends Coleridge spent all his remaining life from 1816 till 1834, when he died.

Meanwhile his children and his home were left to the care of others.  And when Coleridge threw off his home ties and duties it was upon Southey that the burden chiefly fell.  And Southey, kindly and generous, loving his own children fondly, loved and cared for his nephews and nieces too.  We cannot regard Southey as one of our great poets, but when we read his letters, we must love him as a man.  He wrote several long poems, the two best known perhaps are The Curse of Kehama and Thalaba, the one a Hindoo, the other a Mahometan story, but he is better remembered by his short poems, such as The Battle of Blenheim and The Inchcape Rock.

For forty years Southey lived at Greta Hall, and from his letters we get the pleasantest picture of the home-loving, nonsense-loving “comical papa” who had kept the heart of a boy, even when his hair grew gray—­

    “A man he is by nature merry,
    Somewhat Tom-foolish, and comical very;
    Who has gone through the world, not mindful of self,
    Upon easy terms, thank Heaven, with himself.”

He loved his books and he loved the little curly-headed children that gathered about him with pattering feet and chattering tongues, and never wished to be absent from them.  “Oh dear, oh dear,” he says, “there is such a comfort in one’s old coat and old shoes, one’s armchair and own fireside, one’s own writing-desk and own library—­with a little girl climbing up my neck, and saying, ‘Don’t go to London, papa—­you must stay with Edith’; and a little boy, whom I have taught to speak the language of cats, dogs, cuckoos, and jackasses, etc., before he can articulate a word of his own; there is such a comfort in all these things, the transportation to London for four or five weeks seems a heavier punishment than any sins of mine deserve.”