ROBERT SOUTHEY.--Next to Wordsworth, and, with certain characteristic
differences, of the same school, but far beneath him in poetical 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.
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