To prevent the poverty stricken youth from marrying Mrs. Coleridge’s sister, his uncle shipped him to Lisbon, but it was too late, as the lad had already married her secretly on borrowed money. He was sixty years of age before he was financially straight, and before he was eighty he died, leaving one of the finest libraries in Europe and an estate of £12,000. His library was the result of his habits of close study and devout love of books. Of himself he wrote: “My days among the dead are passed; Around me I behold, Where’er these casual eyes are cast, The mighty minds of old; My never-failing friends are they, With whom I converse night and day.” A college chum befriended him in his youthful poverty and settled upon him an annuity of £160, which prevented suffering many times. He prided himself on early rising and was at his desk soon after rising, whether he had special work on hand or not. The morning after he had finished one of his leading poems he wrote the first hundred lines of a more successful one before breakfast. He worked almost literally every hour of every day of every month of every year of his life, until at seventy-six he broke down with softening of the brain. William Wordsworth, a companion and admirer of Southey, succeeded him as laureate. He was good naturedly ridiculed by the literary world, but instead of being maddened thereby as Byron was, instead of being heart-broken and sent to an untimely grave as Keats was, he smiled serenely on his critics and studiously sought to write as his critics did _not_ wish him to write, and thereby lived to enjoy a generous and widespread appreciation. While others went to Greece and Rome, to history and mythology for heroes, he went into the streets, highways and byways, huts and hovels, and chose the rude and crude, the loveless and homeless for his poetic purpose. A more uniformly prosperous, serene, moral man never graced English authorship, and in his age he said with pride, “Whatever the world may think of me or of my poetry is now of little consequence; but one thing is a comfort in my old age, that none of my works … contain a line which I should wish to blot out because it panders to the baser passions of our nature.” Who could ask to have more said of him than that he was always correct in life, sweet in spirit, amiable in disposition, unwaveringly conscious that he was doing his utmost to make the world better? Upon his death an effort was made to abolish the office of laureate, but it failed and Alfred Tennyson was selected, and has for thirty-five years poetized for the glory of England. It is popular in our day to make light of Tennyson’s verse, but it was not always thus, for our own classic Longfellow wrote: “O sweet historian of heart! To thee the laurel leaves belong, To thee our love and our allegiance, For thy allegiance to the poet’s art.”