But already the past had subdued Southey, and if any future lay before him it was a cloud lifeless and grey. In the autumn of 1838 he started for a short tour on the Continent with his old friend Senhouse, his son Cuthbert, John Kenyon, their master of the horse, Captain Jones, the chamberlain, and Crabb Robinson, who was intendant and paid the bills. On the way from Boulogne they turned aside to visit Chinon, for Southey wished to stand on the spot where his first heroine, Joan of Arc, had recognized the French king. At Paris he roamed along the quays and hunted book-stalls. The change and excitement seemed to have served him; he talked freely and was cheerful. “Still,” writes his son, “I could not fail to perceive a considerable change in him from the time we had last travelled together—all his movements were slower, he was subject to frequent fits of absence, and there was an indecision in his manner and an unsteadiness in his step which was wholly unusual with him.” He often lost his way, even in the hotels; then laughed at his own mistakes, and yet was painfully conscious of his failing memory. His journal breaks off abruptly when not more than two-thirds of the tour had been accomplished. In February, 1839, his brother, Dr. Southey—ever a true comrade—describes him as working slowly and with an abstraction not usual to him; sometimes to write even a letter seemed an effort. In midsummer his marriage to Caroline Bowles took place, and with her he returned to Keswick in August. On the way home his friends in London saw that he was much altered. “The animation and peculiar clearness of his mind,” wrote Henry Taylor, “was quite gone, except a gleam or two now and then.... The appearance was that of a placid languor, sometimes approaching to torpor, but not otherwise than cheerful. He is thin and shrunk in person, and that extraordinary face of his has no longer the fire and strength it used to have, though the singular cast of the features and the habitual expressions make it still a most remarkable phenomenon.” Still, his friends had not ceased to hope that tranquillity would restore mental tone, and he himself was planning the completion of great designs. “As soon as we are settled at Keswick, I shall resolutely begin upon the _History of Portugal_, as a duty which I owe to my uncle’s memory. Half of the labour I consider as done. But I have long since found the advantage of doing more than one thing at a time, and the _History of the Monastic Orders_ is the other thing to which I shall set to with hearty good-will. Both these are works of great pith and moment.”