Mrs. Southey, after two years' absence, returned to Keswick, the family home, and closed her pitiable existence there. Southey was now a broken-down man. "There is no one," he mournfully writes, "to partake with me the recollections of the best and happiest portion of my life; and for that reason, were there no other, such recollections must henceforth be purely painful, except when I collect them with the prospects of futurity." Two years after, however, Southey married again: the marriage was one of respect on the part of Caroline Bowles, the gifted authoress, who was his choice, and probably of convenience and friendship on the part of Southey. We have heard that the union greatly tended to his comfort, and that his wife tenderly soothed and cheered his declining years. Southey, in addition to maintaining his own wife and family at Keswick by his literary labors, had the families of his two sisters-in-law occasionally thrown upon his hands. He was not two-and-twenty when Mr. Lovell, who married his wife's sister, fell ill of fever, died, and left his widow and child without the slightest provision. Robert Southey took mother and child at once to his humble hearth, and there the former found happiness until his death. Coleridge, not sufficiently instructed by a genius to which his contemporaries did homage, in a wayward and unpardonable mood withdrew himself from the consolations of home; and in their hour of desertion his wife and children were saved half the knowledge of their hardships by finding a second husband and another father in the sanctuary provided for them by Robert Southey. Coleridge was unpunctual, unbusiness-like, improvident, and dreamy, to the full extent to which poets are said proverbially to be. When he married--his pantisocratic Owenite scheme having just been exploded, and his lectures at Bristol having proved a failure--he retired with Sara Fricker, his wife, to a cottage at Clevedon, near Bristol. Though the cottage was a poor one, consisting of little more than four bare walls, for which he paid only £5 annual rental, he and his wife made it pretty snug with the aid of the funds supplied by their constant friend, Mr. Cottle, the Bristol bookseller. Coleridge decorated this cottage with all the graces that his imagination and fancy could throw around it. It is alluded to in many of his poems:-- "Low was our pretty cot! our tallest rose Peep'd at the chamber window. We could hear At silent noon, and eve, and early morn, The sea's faint murmur. In the open air Our myrtles blossom'd, and across the porch Thick jasmines twin'd: the little landscape round Was green and woody, and refreshed the eye. It was a spot which you might aptly call The valley of seclusion." But his loved young wife was not forgotten; for again he sings:--