tical power, is
Robert Southey, who was born at Bristol, August 12, 1774. He was the son
of a linen-draper in that town. He entered Balliol College, Oxford, in
1792, but left without taking his degree. In 1794 he published a radical
poem on the subject of _Wat Tyler_, the sentiments of which he was
afterwards very willing to repudiate. With the enthusiastic instinct of a
poet, he joined with Wordsworth and Coleridge in a scheme called
_Pantisocrasy_; that is, they were to go together to the banks of the
Susquehanna, in a new country of which they knew nothing except by
description; and there they were to realize a dream of nature in the
golden age--a Platonic republic, where everything was to be in common, and
from which vice and selfishness were to be forever excluded. But these
young neo-platonists had no money, and so the scheme was given up.

In 1795 he married Miss Fricker, a milliner of Bristol, and made a voyage
to Lisbon, where his uncle was chaplain to the British Factory. He led an
unsettled life until 1804, when he established himself at Keswick in the
Lake country, where he spent his life. He was a literary man and nothing
else, and perhaps one of the most industrious writers that ever held a
literary pen. Much of the time, indeed, he wrote for magazines and
reviews, upon whatever subject was suggested to him, to win his daily
bread.

HIS WRITINGS.--After the publication of _Wat Tyler_ he wrote an epic poem
called _Joan of Arc_, in 1796, which was crude and severely criticized.
After some other unimportant essays, he inaugurated his purpose of
illustrating the various oriental mythologies, by the publication of
_Thalaba the Destroyer_, which was received with great disfavor at the
time, and which first coupled his name with that of Wordsworth as of the
school of Lake poets. It is in irregular metre, which at first has the
charm of variety, but which afterwards loses its effect, on account of its
broken, disjointed versification. In 1805 appeared _Madoc_--a poem based
upon the subject of early Welsh discoveries in America. It is a long poem
in two parts: the one descriptive of _Madoc in Wales_ and the other of
_Madoc in Aztlan_. Besides many miscellaneous works in prose, we notice
the issue, in 1810, of _The Curse of Kehama_--the second of the great
mythological poems referred to.

Among his prose works must be mentioned _The Chronicle of the Cid_, _The
History of Brazil_, _The Life of Nelson_, and _The H