Notwithstanding this, it is to that home of Southey, in the beautiful Lake country, that we must go for our most satisfying knowledge of the man. He was so wedded to it; he so loved the murmur of the Greta; so loved his walks; so loved the country freedom; so loved his workaday clothes and cap and his old shoes;[2] so loved his books--double-deep in his library, and running over into hall and parlor and corridors; loved, too, the children’s voices that were around him there--not his own only, but those always next, and almost his own--those of the young Coleridges. These were stranded there, with their mother (sister of Mrs. Southey), owing to the rueful neglect of their father--the bard and metaphysician. I do not think this neglect was due wholly to indifference. Coleridge sidled away from his wife and left her at Keswick in that old home of his own,--where he knew care was good--afraid to encounter her clear, honest, discerning--though unsympathetic--eyes, while he was putting all resources and all subterfuges to the feeding of that opiate craze which had fastened its wolfish fangs upon his very soul. And Southey had most tender and beautiful care for those half-discarded children of the “Ancient Mariner.” He writes in this playful vein to young Hartley (then aged eleven), who is away on a short visit: “Mr. Jackson has bought a cow, but he has had no calf since you left him. Edith [his own daughter] grows like a young giantess, and has a disposition to bite her arm, which you know is a very foolish trick. Your [puppy] friend Dapper, who is, I believe, your God-dog, is in good health, though he grows every summer graver than the last. I am desired to send you as much love as can be enclosed in a letter. I hope it will not be charged double on that account at the post-office. But there is Mrs. Wilson’s love, Mr. Jackson’s, your Aunt Southey’s, your Aunt Lovell’s and Edith’s; with a _purr_ from Bona Marietta [the cat], an open-mouthed kiss from Herbert [the baby], and three wags of the tail from Dapper. I trust they will all arrive safe. Yr. dutiful uncle.” And the same playful humor, and disposition to evoke open-eyed wonderment, runs up and down the lines of that old story of Bishop Hatto and the rats; and that other smart slap at the barbarities of war--which young people know, or ought to know, as the “Battle of Blenheim”--wherein old Kaspar says,-- “it was a shocking sight After the field was won; For many thousand bodies here Lay rotting in the sun. But things like that, you know, must be, After a famous Victory. Great praise the Duke of Marlboro’ won And our good Prince Eugene; ‘Why, ’twas a very wicked thing!’ Said little Wilhelmine. ‘Nay--nay--my little girl,’ quoth he, ‘It was a famous Victory.’”