58     THE EARLY LIFE OF ROBERT SOUTHEY
memories. The schoolboy elegy which has been mentioned
was an expression of personal grief, and he always remem-
bered the long dead sisters with whom, in childhood he had
strung jessamine flowers in his grandmother's garden. In
his schooldays, his grandmother and, at the beginning of his
Oxford career, his father died, the latter under circum-
stances peculiarly distressing and in the prime of life. At
the height of the pantisocracy excitement suddenly died
Southey's most admired college friend, Edmund Seward.
The last person to bid him farewell upon his departure to
Portugal in 1795 was his friend and brother-in-law, Robert
Lovell; the first news to greet him when he returned, eager
to join his bride, was of Lovell's death from "fever." The
widow and child, as inmates of his household for many
years, kept this loss alive for him. A dearly loved cousin,
with whom he had lived as with a sister in his mother's
house, was to languish and die of consumption under his
own roof in 1801. There too and possibly of the same
cause his mother was shortly after to die before her time.
His own first child, named Margaret like his mother and
cousin, died in 1803, just when the fascinations of a year-
old baby were beginning to unfold. All these deaths were to
occur before Southey was thirty, and others in circles only
a little less remote might be added to the list. Later he
was to lose three more children, - the baby Emma; Isabel,
the beauty of the family; and Herbert, a son of brilliant
promise. Of course less sensitive natures toughened under
such trials; Southey endured but never ceased to wince.
It was with less joy than sorrow that, on the threshold of
his old age, he informed his friends of the approaching birth
of another, and, as it turned out, his last child and only
surviving son. "Death," he wrote, "has so often entered
my doors, that he and I have long been familiar."
The passing away of nearly all these friends and kindred
was sudden and unaccountable. A child might be appar-