A SCHOOL OF POETS


line of duty made plain by his faith and purpose, - here
was the moral character of Southey himself.
I have already dwelt upon the fact that Southey and
Wordsworth both emerged from the fever of the revolution
with substantially the same view of life, and that in their
early poems they adopted similar methods of expressing
their idealism. After that, as Thalaba first conspicuously
shows, Southey took other ways, which appeared to dif-
fer from those of Wordsworth more than was really the
case. The latter continued substantially in the way of the
Lyrical Ballads. He surrendered himself to the mystical
i   contemplation of the ideal as he beheld it in nature, and he
made poetry a vehicle for the delineation of the moral
influence of that ideal upon those who live in close com-
munion with nature. His faith was so unquestioning that
he joyfully gave up his life to such poetry; gave up, indeed,
much that he should have kept, - reading, study, travel,
friends new and old, the habit of thought, catholicity of
spirit, almost the very power of poetic expression itself.
Southey, with interesting individual differences, was to go
through essentially the same process. The turn for mystic
contemplation, however, although not absent, as we have
seen in some of his earlier work, was not as strong in him
as in Wordsworth. The latter could consistently present
nature as a calm power in whose world there was no strife,
for the faith of the idealist has always been that there can
be no opposition, no hate, in the presence of perfection, that
evil, by definition, is but the absence of good; the arm of
Artegal falls powerless before the might of Britomart's
awful loveliness. To reap "the harvest of a quiet eye" and
behold that loveliness, not to present the strivings of im-
perfection nor even the omnipotence of its opposite, was
Wordsworth's purpose. Southey, on the other hand, though
forever straining after peace in his own soul and sternly
guiding conduct to that end, never had time for undisturbed


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