gined herself to be with
child, and predicted she would on a certain day give birth to the
promised Prince of Peace, for which occasion great preparations were
made, but all to no purpose; she died of dropsy two months after the time
predicted; she found numbers to believe in her even after her death; she
traded in passports to heaven, which she called "seals," and persuaded
numbers to purchase them (1750-1814).

SOUTHERN CROSS, a constellation of the southern heavens, the five
principal stars of which form a rough and somewhat irregular cross, the
shape of which is gradually changing; it corresponds in the southern
heavens to the Great Bear in the northern.

SOUTHEY, ROBERT, poet-laureate, born, the son of a linen-draper, at
Bristol; was expelled from Westminster School for a satirical article in
the school magazine directed against flogging; in the following year
(1793) entered Balliol College, where he only remained one year, leaving
it a Unitarian and a red-hot republican; was for a time enamoured of
Coleridge's wild pantisocratic scheme; married (1795) clandestinely Edith
Frickes, a penniless girl, sister to Mrs. Coleridge, and in disgrace with
his English relatives visited his uncle in Lisbon, where in six months he
laid the foundation of his knowledge of Spanish history and literature;
the Church and medicine had already, as possible careers, been abandoned,
and on his return to England he made a half-hearted effort to take up
law; still unsettled he again visited Portugal, and finally was relieved
of pecuniary difficulties by the settlement of a pension on him by an old
school friend, which he relinquished in 1807 on receiving a pension from
Government; meanwhile had settled at Keswick, where he prosecuted with
untiring energy the craft of authorship; "Joan of Arc," "Thalaba,"
"Madoc," and "The Curse of Kehama," won for him the laureateship in 1813,
and in the same year appeared his prose masterpiece "The Life of Nelson";
of numerous other works mention may be made of his Histories of Brazil
and the Peninsular War, Lives of Bunyan and Wesley, and "Colloquies on
Society"; declined a baronetcy offered by Peel; domestic affliction--the
death of children, and the insanity and death of his wife--saddened his
later years, which were brightened in the last by his second marriage
(1839) with the poetess and his twenty years' friend, Caroline Bowles; as
a poet Southey has few readers nowadays; full of miscellaneous i