The Sun.
London, England, 1850-01-23 00:00:00

LITETIATUR'E.

LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF
ROBERT SOU TREY. Vols. I. and H.
Edited by his Son, the Rev. Charles Cuthbert
Southey.
Nothing further than an anxious preliminary an-
nouncement can be made of the appearance of the
opening volumes of this singularly attractive biogra-
phy—anxious from that solicitude which must be felt
by every lover of our modern literature, that such a
work should be felicitously brought to a conclusion.
From the examination already made by ourselves of
the commencement of these authentic memorials, we
are sanguine as to the fortunate completion of the en-
terprise, and cordially do we felicitate Mr. Southey,
of Plumbland, on the judicious manner in which he
has entered upon his editorial labours and responsibi-
lities. The voluminous quantity of the materials
placed at his disposal was, assuredly, suffi-
cient to tax the discretion of the most
practised annotator; and yet a gentleman but little
versed, we presume, in the experiences of literary se -
lectior , at least to the extent required in the present
onerous undertaking, has adventured upon his task
with large promise at the outset of its happy termina-
tion. To any one almost the duty of writing thebio-
graphy of one who had so written the biography of
Nelson might well have seemed a task of enormous, if
not insuperable difficulty. Fortunately, however, the
gifted father of the present editor had left behind him,
among his valuable treasury of manuscripts, papers
capable of forming the initial chapters of such
an enterprise. From those charming papers
we Lear in a posthumous vi hisper fi horn
the lips of Robert Southey himself the par-
ticulars of his ancestry, his parentage,
birth, and early education. He himself tells us, in
his most agreeable and gossippiug mood, all about the
Cannon Southeys, and his father's removal from
London to Bristol, about the Hills and the Brad-
fords, about William Tyler and Parson Collins.
These reminiscences he recounts in language breath-
ing of the gentlest and tenderest affections. In ac-
quainting us with the particulars of his childhood, he,
the scholar, the poet, the critic, the historian, and the
philosopher, becomes.once more a child in imagination.
He lingers over the particulars of early years with
that fascinating fondness for his theme, which he had
previously displayed the most
.conspicuously in the
home scenes depicted in the discursive narrative
about the "Doctor." Haiing prepared the
way for his own revelations by this genial and en-•
thralling introduction, the Rev. C. C. Southey begins
in earnest, at page 160 of the first volume, his own
record of Robert Southey's "Life and Correspondence."
Throughout his very able and sequential memoirs,
the editor interpolates here and there those scholas-
tic and graceful letters which his father lavished
with a prodigal band among his friends and fa-'
miliars—they are the jewels adorning the golden
links of his biography. Some are gay with the hilarity
of a young and ardent disposition ' • others breathe the
sadness of a nature less morbid than sensitive, less sad
from a predisposition to gloom than from the sorrow-
ful emotions arising at times out of his intense and
exquisite sensibility. Take as an expression of the
latter trait in his temperament the following eloquent
and beautiful letter, in which he announces the death
of his friend Seward to his friend Bedford—a letter
more tender or more touching we do not remember
ever to have perused:—
" TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD, ESQ.
"Bristol, June 15, 1795.
" Bedford—he is dead ; my dear Edmund Seward!
after six weeks' suffering.
" These, Grosvenor, are the losses that gradually
wean us from life. May that man want consolation in
his last hour, who would rob the survivor of the belief,
Ghat he shall again behold his friend! You know not,
Grosvenor, how I loved poor Edmund: he taught me all
that I have of good. When I went with him into Wor-
ceatershire, I was aqonished at the general joy his return
occasioned—the very dogs ran out to him. Int hat room
where I have so often seen him, he now liesi n his coffin!
" It is like a dream, the idea that he is dead—that his
heart is cold—that he, whom but yesterday morning 1
thought and talked of as alive—as the friend I knew
and loved—is dead! When these things come home to
the heart, they palsy it. lam sick at heart; and, if I
feel thus acutely, what must his sisters feel? what his
poor old mother, whose life was wrapped up in Edmund?
I have seen her look at him till the tears ran down her
cheek.

" There is a strange vacancy in my hear,. The sun
shines as usual, but there is a blank in existence to me.
I have lost a friend, and such a one! God bless you,
my dear, dear Grosvenor! Write to me immediately.
I will try, by assiduous employment, to get rid of very
melancholy thoughts. lam continually dwelling on the
days when we were together: there was a time when the
sun never rose that I did not see Seward. It is very
wrong to feel thus; it is unmanly.
God bless you!
"ROBERT SOUTHEY.
" P.S. I wrote to Edmund on receiving your last: my
letter arrived the hour ( f his death, four o'clock en
Wednesday last. Perhaps he remembered me at thst
hour.
" Grosvenor, I am a child; arid all are children who
tix their happiness on such a reptile as man;—this great,
(his self- ennobled being called man, the next change of
weather may blast him.
" There is another world where all these things will
be amenchtd.
God h alp the man who survives all his friends."
Among the more interesting incidents recounted in
these, the preliminary portions of Dr. Southey's bio-
graphy, are, those of his introduction to the gifted
men who acquired celebrity as his contemporaries—
such men, for example, as Coleridge, Charles Lamb,
Wordsworth, &c. His first acquaintance with
Coleridge appears to have been on the occasion of the
latter's visit to Oxford, after he had enlisted in the
15th Light Dragoons, having previously run away
from Cambridge. One of the earliest indications
afforded by the two friends to each other of the rich-
ness and facility of their poetic genius was, if we re-
member right, the mutual composition of a three act
tragedy, called The Fall of Robesp;erre. The subject
and its execution were conceived one day in a sportive
conversation at Lovell's, where the compact for its
execution was made—the tragedy being produced
complete as.. early as the following evening :
S. T. C. writing the first act, and R. S. the
second, and R. L. the third. , Altogether the notion
of this drama has since been carried out, as far as its
mere form is concerned, by Robert Browning, in his
Blot on the 'Scutcheon. Out of our solicitude
that every amilable material should be placed betimes
at the dispyial of the editor of these volumes, we
gladly give the benefit of our circulation to the fol-
lowing parr.graph in his preface, in which it will be
seen that hoe earnestly solicits the assistance of all
those individuals who happen to have corresponded
with the gi.:fted subject of the biography. Having
enumerated. the sources from which he has already
acquired c masiderable aid in his undertaking, the
reverend eckitor observes :
" While, however, my materials from these sources
have been most extensive, there must still be many in-
dividuals wi th whom I have not been able to communicate,
who have c( sr responded with my father upon literary sub-
jec.s; and, should this meet the eye of any of these
gentlemen,, they would confer a great obligation upon me
by permit' lug me the use of any of his letters to them,
which are' likely sometimes to possess an interest dif-
ferent fro a those addressed to intimate friends and
frequent c torrespondents."
When coo: pleted the " Life and Correspondence" will
extend to six volumes, at the outset of which we have
engravin gs from Westall's landscape of Keswick, and
from Opee's portrait of Southey. The work promises
to be an important addition to our miscellaneous lite-
rature.

HESP.EROS ; or Travels in the West. By Mrs.
HouSloun,author of "Texas and the Gulf 91 Mexico.'
2 Vu;/8.

In noticing books of travels, we have repeatedly
observ..ed how much the interest of such works de-
pends. on the manner of the writer. An agreeable
cieerfrite gives a new charm to pleasant places, and
invests even dull ones with some attraction. Such
is J.Virs. Houstoun's happy faculty. She reminds
us repeatedly of the lady-writer who truth.
fully boasted that " she gossipped whenever
'`she pleased and pleased- whenever -she gos-
sipped." It was the purpose of ,this new wan-
derer in the West to describe, not what has
already been so frequently described, the Jaws,
institutions, and fixed establishments of America, but
to lay before English eyes a sketch of the rapidly
changing appearance of the men and manners of
America. She has done this in a most delightful
way. From the moment when, in the midst of a
Liverpool mist, she lost sight of her native country,
and soon after found herself more than once echoing
the Irishman's wish, that " if Britannia did rule the
waves she'd just be so kind as to rule 'em straight,
anyhow," until her return to the same misty English
atmosphere, Mrs. Iloustoun's wanderings in the
West have furnished the theme for two most
interesting volumes, abounding in anecdote
and enlivened by a charming sprightliness of manner,
now and then subdued by some passing meditation.
One of these passages of transient sadness is occa-
sioned by a meeting, on board the Halifax steamer,
with a beautiful girl returning from Europe, where
she had been receiving her education. "The fair
creature entered the saloon alone," writes Mrs.
Houstoun, "and alone she remained, for lovely as she
was, no one addressed her; but on the contrary, she
appeared to be purposely avoided by every one pre-
sent. Even the commonest acts of civility were in
her case neglected lt will be asked by
the uninitiated why this fair being was set apart in
the way I have described, and why she was like a
tabooed creature, or rather a Pariah, from %hick. men
and women seemed to shrink as from an unholy tiling.
It was this. Within the veins of this fair and delicate
girl ran a few drops of that dark Wood, which is sup-
posed by many—l fear, indeed, by most in Americs
—to place the individual cursed by so hideous art
accident without the pale of social existence. It r. oat-
tered not that this poor girl was fair in form Fuld
gentle and kind in nature --her mother was a