In youth our steps are light, and our minds are ductile, and knowledge is easily laid up; but if we neglect our spring, our summers will be useless and contemptible, our harvest will be chaff, and the winter of our old age unrespected and desolate." [1311] Southey was as laborious a worker as Scott.

Indeed, work might almost be said to form part of his religion.

He was only nineteen when he wrote these words:--"Nineteen years! certainly a fourth part of my life; perhaps how great a part! and yet I have been of no service to society.
The clown who scares crows for twopence a day is a more useful man; he preserves the bread which I eat in idleness." And yet Southey had not been idle as a boy--on the contrary, he had been a most diligent student.

He had not only read largely in English literature, but was well acquainted, through translations, with Tasso, Ariosto, Homer, and Ovid.

He felt, however, as if his life had been purposeless, and he determined to do something.