OXFORD - POETRY - EDITH FRICKER


revolution are those in which sound learning, especially in
the fields that Southey chose, may be most ardently desired
but is seldom prosperously sought.
The experiences that prompted Southey's cravings for an
explanation of life to which he could give religious and
poetic faith were in essence those that all humanity shares.
There was first the phenomenon of death, and there was
also the phenomenon of evil, which could not, now that
nature was believed good, be assumed as the primal justi-
fication of death, but had to be conceived as both a corrup-
tion in man's nature and as the results of that corruption
embodied as society; evil, that is, became "man's inhu-
manity to man." It was envisaged, not so much in per-
sonal as in political and social wrong-doing on the part of
the corrupt, of kings and mobs acting by tyranny or by
some vague cataclysm of terror. These things overspread
Southey's life with fear and hate, but it must be added to
his credit that he also possessed an unfailing curiosity con-
cerning mere disconnected facts of experience in all times
and places, even when they betrayed for him no moral
import whatever. It was only when he sought to explain
the facts he had collected that his perturbation of soul
became evident.
Such were Southey's dominating emotions. They were
expressed in the terms of his own day, but what the terms
were it is not difficult to discern. In the first place the
pain and mystery of death was a far more frequent experi-
ence to the men of the eighteenth century than we are
prone to realize in this more advanced day of medical
science. Southey's acquaintance, before as well as after
1793, with death in his own family, - and his experience
may be paralleled by many other cases - was such as would
appall any person of similar extraction and temperament
to-day. He was one of nine children; five died in infancy,
and of these, four were a poignant part of his own boyhood


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