Southern Cross

a constellation visible only in the southern hemisphere. It consists of four stars, one of which is of the first magnitude, arranged in the form of a cross. The upper and lower stars form the pointers to the south pole; the right and left ones point directly east and west. Astronomers calculate that six thousand years ago the Southern Cross was visible in England and Germany just above the horizon.

Southey (1774-1843), an English poet. He was born at Bristol, the son of a draper of that place. He was educated at Oxford and with Coleridge and Wordsworth formed the trio of Lake Poets. He owned a library of over 14,000 volumes, was a thoroughgoing and methodical reader, and an untiring writer, his works being filled with the results of painstaking research. His writings fill 109 volumes, not including some 150 articles, essays, criticisms, poems, and biographies for current periodicals. In 1813 he succeeded Henry James Pye as poet laureate. He had a democratic, even revolutionary, cast of mind, and was a man of influence, but he has left nothing entitling him to rank as a genius. The Battle of Blenheim and the Cataract of Lodore are his most popular poems. Madoc, Thalaba, Roderick, the Last of the Goths, and The Curse of Kehama are long poems, epic in form.