The half century of Macaulay's prophecy has come, and that prophecy has been fulfilled as to the rarity of Southey's readers as a poet. Has the other part come true too? I should hesitate to say that it has. Esteem not merely for the man but for the writer can never fail Southey whenever he is read by competent persons: admiration may be less prompt to come at call. Two among his smaller pieces--the beautiful "Holly Tree," and the much later but exquisite stanzas "My days among the dead are past"--can never be in any danger; the grasp of the grotesque-terrific, which the poet shows in the "Old Woman of Berkley" and a great many other places, anticipates the _Ingoldsby Legends_ with equal ease but with a finer literary gift; some other things are really admirable and not a little pleasing. But the longer poems, if they are ever to live, are still dry bones. _Thalaba_, one of the best, is spoilt by the dogged craze against rhyme, which is more, not less, needed in irregular than in regular verse. _Joan of Arc_, _Madoc_, _Roderick_, have not escaped that curse of blank verse which only Milton, and he not always, has conquered in really long poems. _Kehama_, the only great poem in which the poet no longer disdains the almost indispensable aid to poetry in our modern and loosely quantified tongue, is much better than any of the others. The Curse itself is about as good as it can be, and many other passages are not far below it; but to the general taste the piece suffers from the remote character of the subject, which is not generally and humanly interesting, and from the mass of tedious detail.