Such wisdom of the heart was justified; the year of growing love bore precious fruit. When Edith May was ten years old her father dedicated to her, in verses laden with a father’s tenderest thoughts and feelings, his _Tale of Paraguay_. He recalls the day of her birth, the preceding sorrow for his first child, whose infant features have faded from him like a passing cloud; the gladness of that singing month of May; the seasons that followed during which he observed the dawning of the divine light in her eyes; the playful guiles by which he won from her repeated kisses: to him these ten years seem like yesterday; but to her they have brought discourse of reason, with the sense of time and change:— “And I have seen thine eyes suffused in grief When I have said that with autumnal grey The touch of old hath mark’d thy father’s head; That even the longest day of life is brief, And mine is falling fast into the yellow leaf.” Other children followed, until a happy stir of life filled the house. Emma, the quietest of infants, whose voice was seldom heard, and whose dark-grey eyes too seldom shone in her father’s study, slipped quietly out of the world after a hand’s-breadth of existence; but to Southey she was no more really lost than the buried brother and sister were to the cottage girl of Wordsworth’s _We are seven_. “I have five children,” he says in 1809; “three of them at home, and two under my mother’s care in heaven.” Of all, the most radiantly beautiful was Isabel; the most passionately loved was Herbert. “My other two are the most perfect contrast you ever saw. Bertha, whom I call Queen Henry the Eighth, from her likeness to King Bluebeard, grows like Jonah’s gourd, and is the very picture of robust health; and little Kate hardly seems to grow at all, though perfectly well—she is round as a mushroom-button. Bertha, the bluff queen, is just as grave as Kate is garrulous; they are inseparable playfellows, and go about the house hand in hand.”