oem, "Joan of Arc,"
was written at the age of nineteen, and gave him, as he called it, "a
Baxter's shove into the right place in the world." At the opening of the
Nineteenth Century, he published the "wild and wondrous song" of "Thalaba,
the Destroyer," founded on Moslem mythology. "Kehema," founded on Hindu
lore, followed. In 1803, after some years of wandering, the poet went to
live at Greta Hall, near Keswick, which remained his home until his death.
Besides a long line of prose works, Southey wrote innumerable short poems.
Famous among them is the ballad of the battle of Blenheim, with its homely
irony:

"With fire and sword the country round
Was wasted far and wide,
And many a childing mother then
And new-born baby died;
But things like that, you know, must be
At every famous victory."

[Sidenote: Brilliant occasional pieces]

[Sidenote: Southey's works]

[Sidenote: "Stanzas in My Library"]

Southey nourished a passionate hatred against Napoleon Bonaparte. Again and
again he invoked the Muse against the world conqueror. Thus he wrote to
Landor in 1814: "For five years I have been preaching the policy, the duty,
the necessity of declaring Bonaparte under the ban of human nature." Under
this stress of feeling he wrote his great "Ode During the Negotiations for
Peace." It was the most powerful of his occasional pieces. In 1813, he was
made Poet Laureate. As such, it fell to him to write another occasional
piece on the death of the Princess Charlotte. The grace and beauty of his
lines on this occasion have long outlived the memory of that lamented
princess. Unlike his great contemporaries, Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott,
Southey never achieved a great material success. Having married young, he
often walked the streets, so he himself confessed, "not having eighteen
pence for a dinner, nor bread and cheese at his lodgings." In 1835, when he
was sixty-one years old, he wrote to Sir Robert Peel while declining the
offer of a baronetcy, "Last year for the first time in my life I was
provided with a year's expenditure beforehand." Yet his works at this time
filled nearly a hundred volumes. In the words of his brother poets:

"Southey's epics crammed the creaking shelves."

It was in his declining age that he wrote the prophetic "Stanzas Written in
My Library":

My days among the Dead are passed:
Around me I behold,
Where'er these casual eyes are cast,
The almighty minds of old;
M