The spectre of the murdered boy in _Lord William_ shone upon by a sudden moonbeam, and surrounded by the welter of waves, is more than a picturesque apparition; readers of good-will may find him a very genuine little ghost, a stern and sad justicer. What has been named “the lyrical cry” is hard to find in any of Southey’s shorter poems. In _Roderick_ and elsewhere he takes delight in representing great moments of life when fates are decided; but such moments are usually represented as eminences on which will and passion wrestle in a mortal embrace, and if the cry of passion be heard, it is often a half-stifled death cry. The best of Southey’s shorter poems, expressing personal feelings, are those which sum up the virtue spread over seasons of life and long habitual moods. Sometimes he is simply sportive, as a serious man released from thought and toil may be, and at such times the sportiveness, while genuine as a schoolboy’s, is, like a schoolboy’s, the reverse of keen-edged; on other occasions he expresses simply a strong man’s endurance of sorrow; but more often an undertone of gravity appears through his glee, and in his sorrow there is something of solemn joy. All this year (1799) _Madoc_ was steadily advancing, and _The Destruction of the Dom Daniel_ had been already sketched in outline. Southey was fortunate in finding an admirable listener. The Pneumatic Institution, established in Bristol by Dr. Beddoes, was now under the care of a youth lately an apothecary’s apprentice at Penzance, a poet, but still more a philosopher, “a miraculous young man.” “He is not yet twenty-one, nor has he applied to chemistry more than eighteen months, but he has advanced with such seven-leagued strides as to overtake everybody. His name is Davy”—Humphry Davy—“the young chemist, the young everything, the man least ostentatious, of first talent that I have ever known.” Southey would walk across from Westbury, an easy walk over beautiful ground, to breathe Davy’s wonder-working gas, “which excites all possible mental and muscular energy, and induces almost a delirium of pleasurable sensations without any subsequent dejection.” Pleased to find scientific proof that he possessed a poet’s fine susceptibility, he records that the nitrous oxide wrought upon him more readily than upon any other of its votaries. “Oh, Tom!” he exclaims, gasping and ebullient—“oh, Tom! such a gas has Davy discovered, the gaseous oxyde!... Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name. I am going for more this evening; it makes one strong, and so happy! so gloriously happy!... Oh, excellent air-bag!” If Southey drew inspiration from Davy’s air-bag, could Davy do less than lend his ear to Southey’s epic? They would stroll back to Martin Hall—so christened because the birds who love delicate air built under its eaves their “pendant beds”—and in the large sitting-room, its recesses stored with books, or seated near the