Thereafter he comes back to his young wife; is much in London and thereabout; coming to know Charles Lamb, Rogers, and Moore, with other such. He is described at that day as tall--a most presentable man--with dark hair and eyes, wonderful arched brows; “head of a poet,” Byron said; looking up and off, with proud foretaste of the victories he will win; he has, too, very early, made bold literary thrust at that old story of Joan of Arc: a good topic, of large human interest, but not over successfully dealt with by him. After this came that extraordinary poem of _Thalaba_, the first of a triad of poems which excited great literary wonderment (the others being the _Curse of Kehama_ and _Madoc_). They are rarely heard of now and scarcely known. Beyond that fragment from _Kehama_, beginning
hardly a page from either has drifted from the high sea of letters into those sheltered bays where the makers of anthologies ply their trade. Yet no weak man could have written either one of these almost forgotten poems of Southey; recondite learning makes its pulse felt in them; bright fancies blaze almost blindingly here and there; old myths of Arabia and Welsh fables are galvanized and brought to life, and set off with special knowledge and cumbrous aids of stilted and redundant prosody; but all is utterly remote from human sympathies, and all as cold--however it may attract by its glitter--as the dead hand
which holds the magic taper in the Dom Daniel cavern of _Thalaba_.
A fourth long poem--written much later in life--_Roderick the Goth_, has a more substantial basis of human story, and so makes larger appeal to popular interest; but it had never a marked success.
Meantime, Southey has not kept closely by London; there have been peregrinations, and huntings for a home--for children and books must have a settlement. Through friends of influence he had come to a fairly good political appointment in Ireland, but has no love for the bulls and blunderbusses which adorn life there; nor will he tutor his patron’s boys--which also comes into the scale of his duties--so gives up that chance of a livelihood. There is, too, a new trip to Portugal with his wife; and a new reverent and dreamy listening to the rustle of the shining leaves of the orange-trees of Cintra. I do not think those murmurous tales of the trees of Portugal, burdened with old monastic flavors, ever went out of his ears wholly till he died. But finally the poet does come to settlement, somewhere about 1803--in that Keswick home, where we found him at the opening of our chapter.