Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/155

 Zeitlin 149 evaporated on contract with some cold realities. It was the cal- culating spirit of Southey that stripped the dream of one illusory feature after another. His sober and admirable thoughtfulness for his mother and for the wife he was about to take, as well as for other persons whose welfare was closely bound up with his own, had already extinguished his own impractical dreams. The recovery from Pantisocracy was the beginning of a general reaction, stimu- lated, as Dr. Haller suggests, in part by antagonism to Coleridge's philosophic madness. His desire for change in political institutions was considerably allayed by his first visit to Portugal, in 1796, though it is hard to understand why the discovery of a more wretched state of affairs in Portugal should reconcile one to evils deeply felt in England. It seems to show how little Southey's principles were the outcome of reasoning, how much the result of his fundamentally timid temperament. After losing his exalted hopes for mankind, Southey, like Wordsworth, turned to mystic adoration of inanimate nature. To bring into relief the prominence of Southey's poetry, Dr. Haller points out that his contemporaries became aware of the emergence of a new school of poetry in the persons of a group. of young men Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, Charles Lloyd, Robert Lovel who were associated by intimate personal ties, who fre- quently indulged in joint publication, and whose poetry was characterized by certain striking departures from the conventional. They were recognized by their enthusiasm for some of the new ideas that were disturbing Europe, by " the free and daring use of new forms, together with the turning to nature, to country scenes and country people, and the use of a greater range as well as greater simplicity of language. " Southey had published more frequently and on a more ambitious scale than any of the other poets in this group. Before the date of Lyrical Ballads he was known as the author of a pretentious epic, "Joan of Arc," and his shorter poems had appeared in several Other volumes. He had besides written a book of his travels in Portugal and was contributing to the Morning Post and the Critical Review. It was therefore natural that he should have been singled out as the representative of the New School when Canning needed a scapegoat for the Anti-Jacobin. On this eminence he was finally established by "Thalaba" and Jeffrey's memorable article on it in the first number of the Edinburgh Review associating Southey's poetical principles with those of Wordsworth. Dr. Haller's analysis of the elements which at this period were common to the poetry of Southey and Wordsworth justifies the attitude of contemporary critics in attaching to them a common denomination. Subsequently their paths diverged and they sought to disclaim any affinity, imputing the epithet of "lakers" to the accident of geographical neighborhood. Dr. Haller enters into a very careful examination of all of Southey's poetry up to the publication of "Thalaba. " He studies