Your loving old
G.P.
18
MY DEAR ANTONY,
To-day I will write about Robert Southey, and, as he and Coleridge
married sisters, you may claim a distant relationship with him. His
personal character was beautiful and unselfish, and his dwelling at
Keswick was the home that for years sheltered Coleridge's children.
With hardly an exception the poets of England have had an easy and
royal mastery of prose; and in the case of Robert Southey there are
some, and they are not the worst critics, who anticipate that his prose
will long outlast his poetry in the Temple of Fame.
We may suppose that to a man whose whole private life was stainlessly
dedicated to a noble rectitude of conduct, and whose every act was
sternly subjected to the judgment of an unbending conscience, some
circumstances of the private life of Nelson must have been distasteful
and open to censure; but no such reservations dimmed the splendour
of Southey's tribute to the public hero who gave his life in the act of
establishing, beyond reach of dispute or cavil, the throne of England as
Queen of the Sea.
"The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a
public calamity; men started at the intelligence, and turned pale,
as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend.
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