The word _high-souled_ takes possession of the mind as we think of Southey’s heroic personages. Poetry, he held, ought rather to elevate than to affect—a Stoical doctrine transferred to art, which meant that his own poetry was derived more from admiration of great qualities than from sympathy with individual men or women. Neither the quick and passionate tenderness of Burns nor the stringent pathos of Wordsworth can be found in Southey’s verse. No eye probably ever shed a tear over the misery of Ladurlad and his persecuted daughter. She, like the lady in _Comus_, is set above our pity and perhaps our love. In _Kehama_, a work of Southey’s mature years, the chivalric ardour of his earlier heroes is transformed into the sterner virtues of fortitude and an almost despairing constancy. The power of evil, as conceived by the poet, has grown more despotic; little can be achieved by the light-winged Glendoveer—a more radiant Thalaba—against the Rajah; only the lidless eye of Seeva can destroy that tyranny of lust and pride. _Roderick_ marks a higher stage in the development of Southey’s ethical ideal. Roderick, too, is a delegated champion of right against force and fraud; he too endures mighty pains. But he is neither such a combatant, pure and intrepid, as goes forth from the Arab tent, nor such a blameless martyr as Ladurlad. He is first a sinner enduring just punishment; then a stricken penitent; and from his shame and remorse he is at last uplifted by enthusiasm, on behalf of his God and his people, into a warrior saint, the Gothic Maccabee. _Madoc_ stands somewhat away from the line of Southey’s other narrative poems. Though, as Scott objected, the personages in _Madoc_ are too nearly abstract types, Southey’s ethical spirit dominates this poem less than any of the others. The narrative flows on more simply. The New-World portion tells a story full of picturesque incident, with the same skill and grace that belong to Southey’s best prose writings. Landor highly esteemed _Madoc_. Scott declared that he had read it three times since his first cursory perusal, and each time with increased admiration of the poetry. Fox was in the habit of reading aloud after supper to eleven o’clock, when it was the rule at St. Ann’s Hill to retire; but while _Madoc_ was in his hand, he read until after midnight. Those, however, who opened the bulky quarto were few: the tale was out of relation with the time; it interpreted no need, no aspiration, no passion of the dawn of the present century. And the mind of the time was not enough disengaged to concern itself deeply with the supposed adventures of a Welsh prince of the twelfth century among the natives of America.