PORTUGAL- LAW AND LITERATURE


are read in varying degrees of directness, not with Words-
worth's power, but very much in Wordsworth's manner and
spirit. Similarly the lessons to be derived from simple folk,
children, and lower animals are expressed in The Old Man's
Comforts, To a Bee, To a Spider, The Battle of Blenheim,
The Sailor, The Victory, The Cross Roads, Jasper, The Com-
plaints of the Poor, and especially in the English Eclogues.
As compared with the best that Wordsworth was writing
at the same time, these things are but crude and pedestrian.
Southey had neither the genius nor the leisure to express
the most intense moods of mysticism, but he was aiming at
precisely the same effects. At best he achieved but a
secondary success like The Holly Tree or a household im-
mortality that at least equals We Are Seven in The Battle
v    of Blenheim; yet in some lesser known pieces his resem-
blance and even his approach to Wordsworth are still more
striking. The Victory, for instance, is in theme and treat-
ment almost purely Wordsworthian. A sailor on Thomas
Southey's ship was married to a woman whom he had first
seduced and then, in a revulsion of good feeling, married
and treated honorably. Pressed into the navy, he showed
sufficient address, though almost illiterate, to rise to mid-
shipman's rank, and sent most of his pay to his wife and
family. In a successful engagement with a French vessel
he was killed. Southey, struck by the nobility of the man,
not only wrote a poem about him, but tried to raise a few
pounds for his widow. If he had been a dalesman of Cum-
berland, he might have found a place in The Excursion.
"He was one
Whose uncorrupted heart could keenly feel
A husband's love, a father's anxiousness;
That from the wages of his toil he fed
The distant dear ones, and would talk of them
At midnight when he trod the silent deck
With him he valued, - talk of them, of joys


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