Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/154

 148 Reviews and Notes THE EARLY LIFE OF ROBERT SOUTHEY, 1774-1803. By William Haller, Ph.D., Instructor in English in Columbia University, New York, Columbian University Press, 1917. It is not necessary to justify a study of the life of Southey. The curious thing is that no adequate attempt at a systematic analysis of his mind and his work has been made hitherto. There have been only the undigested masses of correspondence published by mem- bers of his family and the appreciative but sketchy account by Edward Dowden in the English Men of Letters Series. Interest in Southey in the past two generations has been flickering, with only here and there a devoted admirer to keep the flame alive or a dispassionate student to vindicate for a zealous man of letters the rank which in his own day he enjoyed among the greatest of his craft. It is in the spirit of one of the latter group that Dr. Haller approaches his subject. By a careful examination of Southey's early poetry in relation to the prevailing tendencies in politics and philosophy, and more particularly by emphasizing Southey's priority in bringing before readers of literature the peculiar ideas and style of the new school of poetry, he succeeds in explaining how and with what justice Southey came to be looked upon as the leading spirit of the new school and brings the historical importance of Southey into very striking relief. In the preface Dr. Haller makes a modest statement of the scope of his undertaking. "My purpose," he says, "is merely to supply students with a faithful account of the most interesting and least known period in the life and work of an important English writer of a momentous time in history. This book covers, therefore, only the first twenty-nine years of Southey's career his boyhood at school and university; his reactions to literary and political move- ments in his youth; his early associations with Coleridge, Lamb, Wordsworth, Humphry Davy, John Rickman, William Taylor of Norwich, and others; his share in a scheme for emigration to America for the purpose of establishing there a communistic society or 'pantisocracy'; his characteristics as a young man, poet, and man of letters, together with the rise of his peculiar literary and personal reputation in association with the group of men who came to be known as the ' lake school ' ; and in conclusion his settling down in what was to be his final home at Keswick. " The new material for the purely biographic aspect of the study is evidently neither extensive nor important. But a painstaking correlation of all the available facts results in clarifying some of the interesting incidents in Southey's life. We obtain for the first time a complete and coherent narrative of the Pantisocratic scheme. We learn how the idea originated with Southey and caught fire in the mind of Coleridge, how it was fed by plausible land speculators from the new world, how it struggled valiantly to find a definite habitat first on the banks of the Susquehanna and then in the less remote but perhaps equally romantic regions of Wales, and how it finally