with it a little; and in the season of company I can never count upon an evening’s work. Supper at half-past nine, after which I read an hour, and then to bed. The greatest part of my miscellaneous work is done in the odds and ends of time.” It was part of Southey’s regimen to carry on several works at once; this he found to be economy of time, and he believed it necessary for the preservation of his health. Whenever one object entirely occupied his attention, it haunted him, oppressed him, troubled his dreams. The remedy was simple—to do one thing in the morning, another in the evening. To lay down poetry and presently to attack history seems feasible, and no ill policy for one who is forced to take all he can out of himself; but Southey would turn from one poetical theme to another, and could day by day advance with a pair of epics. This was a source of unfailing wonder to Landor. “When I write a poem,” he says, “my heart and all my feelings are upon it.... High poems will not admit flirtation.” Little by little was Southey’s way, and so he got on with many things. “Last night,” he writes to Bedford, “I began the Preface [to _Specimens of English Poets_]—huzza! And now, Grosvenor, let me tell you what I have to do. I am writing—1. _The History of Portugal_; 2. _The Chronicle of the Cid_; 3. _The Curse of Kehama_; 4. _Espriella’s Letters_. Look you, all these _I am_ writing.... By way of interlude comes in this preface. Don’t swear, and bid me do one thing at a time. I tell you I can’t afford to do one thing at a time—no, nor two neither; and it is only by doing many things that I contrive to do so much: for I cannot work long together at anything without hurting myself, and so I do everything by heats; then, by the time I am tired of one, my inclination for another is come round.” A strong, deliberate energy, accordingly, is at the back of all Southey’s work; but not that blind creative rapture which will have its own way, and leaves its subject weak but appeased. “In the day-time I laboured,” says Landor, “and at night unburdened my soul, shedding many tears. My _Tiberius_ has so shaken me at last that the least thing affects me violently.” Southey shrank back from such agitations. A great Elizabethan poet is described by one of his contemporaries as one standing “Up to the chin in the Pierian flood.” Southey did not wade so far; he stepped down calmly until the smooth waters touched his waist; dipped seven times, and returned to the bank. It was a beautiful and an elevating rite; but the waves sing with lyric lips only in the midmost stream; and he who sings with them, and is swift as they, need not wonder if he sink after a time, faint, breathless, delighted.