Or in the flowers of earth or stars of heaven; Love strong as death See how I turn toward the turf, as he And in a love which first sees but the whole, (From Balder, Scene xxiv.) Keith of Ravelston. The murmur of the mourning ghost That keeps the shadowy kine, 'Oh, Keith of Ravelston, The sorrows of thy line!' Ravelston, Ravelston, The merry path that leads Down the golden morning hill, Ravelston, Ravelston, The stile beneath the tree, She sang her song, she kept her kine, His henchmen sing, his hawk-bells ring, Oh, Keith of Ravelston, The sorrows of thy line! Year after year, where Andrew came, She keeps the shadowy kine; Oh, Keith of Ravelston, The sorrows of thy line! I lay my hand upon the stile, Yet, stranger! here, from year to year, She keeps her shadowy kine; Oh, Keith of Ravelston, The sorrows of thy line! Step out three steps, where Andrew stood— 'Tis not the burn I hear! She makes her immemorial moan, She keeps her shadowy kine; Oh, Keith of Ravelston, The sorrows of thy line! (From 'A Nuptial Eve,' in England in Time of War.) Professor Nichol edited Dobell's collected poems in 1875, and his prose works in 1876 as Thoughts on Art, Philosophy, and Religion. The Life and Letters of Sydney Dobell appeared in 1878; and there is a Memoir by W. Sharp prefixed to his selected poems (1887). Alexander Smith (1830-67), born at Kilmarnock, but brought up at Paisley and Glasgow, became, like his father, a pattern-designer, and sent occasional poems to the Glasgow Citizen. His Life Drama appeared in the London Critic (1851), and in 1853 was reprinted in a volume of which ten thousand copies were sold. A reaction soon set in, and the poet had scarcely found himself famous when he began to be fiercely assailed. The faults of his book were obvious enough; every page bore tokens of immaturity and extravagance; while a somewhat narrow reading having passionately attached him to Keats and Tennyson, their turns of expression reappeared here and there in his verse, and the cry of plagiarism was of course raised. With all his defects, Alexander Smith has always a richness and originality of imagery that more than atone for them; and few poets since Shakespeare's day have written occasional lines with a more Shakespearian ring. In one of Miss Mitford's letters we read: 'Mr Kingsley says that Alfred Tennyson says that Alexander Smith's poems show fancy, but not imagination; and on my repeating this to Mrs Browning, she said it was exactly her impression.' In 1854 Smith was appointed Secretary to Edinburgh University, and continued his literary pursuits. He joined with Sydney Dobell in writing a series of War Sonnets; he contributed prose essays to some of the periodicals; and in 1857 he published City Poems, in 1861 Edwin of Deira. His prose works, which show poetic feeling and have not a little poetic charm, include Dreamthorp, a volume of essays (1863); A Summer in Skye (1865); and Alfred Hagart's Household (1866), a semi-autobiographical story of Scottish life. He edited, with a good Memoir, Burns's Poems (1865), and Howe's Golden Leaves from the American Poets (1866). Autumn. The lark is singing in the blinding sky, Hedges are white with May. The bridegroom sea Then proud, runs up to kiss her. All is fair- It joined November's troop, then marching past; A few half-withered flowers. (From A Life Drama.) The Canker in the Rose. A little footpath quivers up the height, And what a vision for a townsman's sight! A village, peeping from its orchard bloom, I hear the smithy's hammer, stroke on stroke; The parson listens in his garden-walk, Alas! Time's webs are rotten, warp and woof; The broken barrow hates the prosperous dray; (From 'Squire Maurice' in City Poems.) The Bonds of Environment. A dropt rose lying in my way, Athwart the noisy street, Alike to me the desert flower, The belfried spire, the street is dead, The clang of iron hours: It moves me not-I know her tomb Is yonder in the shapeless gloom. All raptures of this mortal breath, Dwell in thy noise alone: Of me thou hast become a partSome kindred with my human heart Lives in thy streets of stone; For we have been familiar more Than galley-slave and weary oar. (From 'Glasgow' in City Poems.) Besides Early Years of Alexander Smith (1869), by the Rev. T. Brisbane, there is a Memoir by Patrick Proctor Alexander prefixed to his Last Leaves (1869). William Allingham (1824-89) was of English family, but was a native of Ballyshannon in Donegal, where his father managed a bank. There he was educated, and there at an early age he began to contribute to periodical literature. He became supervisor of Customs in his native place— The kindly spot, the friendly town, where every one is known, And not a face in all the place but partly seems my own; but removed in the same service to England, and settled in London, where in 1874 he succeeded Froude as editor of Fraser's Magazine. His works included Poems (1850); Day and Night Songs (1854); Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864); Fifty Modern Poems (1865); Songs, Poems, and Ballads (1877); Evil May Day and Ashby Manor (1883); Blackberries (1884); and Irish Songs and Poems (1887). His verse is free from obscurity, mysticism, or the 'spasmodic' temper, is fresh and graceful, shows a delicate fancy and, especially in the lyrics, a sweet and varied melody. Some of his best work is descriptive. Laurence Bloomfield, the story of a young Irish landlord who, amidst manifold discouragement, seeks to improve the condition of the people on his property, was by Allingham regarded as his best work, yet by the general reader it was but coldly received. He wrote two plays which were never produced, and a delightful prose record of his walks in various corners of England, The Rambles of Patricius Walker (reprinted from Fraser). In 1874 he had married Helen Paterson, who, born near Burtonon-Trent, entered the schools of the Academy in 1867, and made herself a name as a book-illustrator and painter in water-colours. An Irishman to the Nightingales. The glen where mountain-torrents rave, With all their isles; and mystic towers Less sad if they might hear that perfect song! What scared ye? (ours, I think, of old) And fierce oppression's bigot crew, GEORGE MACDONALD. From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry. Come back, O birds, or come at last! For Ireland's furious days are past; And, purged of enmity and wrong, Her eye, her step, grow calm and strong. Why should we miss that pure delight? Brief is the journey, swift the flight; And Hesper finds no fairer maids In Spanish bowers or English glades, No loves more true on any shore, No lovers loving music more. Melodious Erin, warm of heart, Entreats you; stay not then apart, But bid the merles and throstles know (And ere another May-time go) Their place is in the second row. Come to the west, dear nightingales! The rose and myrtle bloom in Irish vales. 1 Native Irish warriors. A Dream. I heard the dogs howl in the moonlight night; I went to the window to see the sight; On they pass'd, and on they pass'd; Who were drown'd, I knew, in the awful sea. A long, long crowd-where each seem'd lonely, She linger'd a moment--she might not stay. How long since I saw that fair pale face! On, on, a moving bridge they made Across the moon-stream, from shade to shade, Young and old, women and men ; Many long-forgot, but remember'd then. And first there came a bitter laughter; A sound of tears the moment after; His complete works, prose and verse, were published in six volumes in 1888-93, and a one-volume selection in 1892; and D. G. Rossetti's Letters to Allingham were edited by Dr Birkbeck Hill (1898). A Life by his wife was promised. George Macdonald, born at Huntly in Aberdeenshire, of the Glencoe stock, in 1824, was educated at Aberdeen University and the Independent College at Highbury. He became pastor at Arundel and at Manchester, but ill-health drove him to Algiers and to literature. His first book, Within and Without (1856), a dramatic poem, was followed by another volume of Poems (1857) and by Phantastes, a Faerie Romance (1858). A long series of novels succeeded, including David Elginbrod, his first really popular success (1862), The Portent (1864), Alec Forbes (1865), Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1866), Guild Court (1867), The Seaboard Parish (1868), Robert Falconer (1868), Malcolm (1874), St George and St Michael (1875), The Marquis of Lossie (1877), Sir Gibbie (1879), Mary Marston (1881), Lilith (1895), and Salted with Fire (1897). From time to time he continued to preach most impressive sermons, and as a lecturer on Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and other literary topics he attracted large audiences at home and in the United States. His poetry is simple but spiritual, instinct with a fresh and delicate fancy, and a tender and loving insight into nature. In his novels, to the essential story-telling and dramatic gift he adds a genial humour, a tolerant and kindly sympathy with most sides of life, especially that (so much exploited since his day) of Scottish country-folk. In the earnestness of his recoil from what he conceived to be the narrowness of Calvinism, he at times waxes too polemical and hortatory; even then the didactic manner is relieved by the romancer's power of dramatic dialogue, as well as by the revelation of exceptionally keen spiritual instincts, tolerance, and native fervour of faith, hope, and charity. It is perhaps characteristic of his Scottish temper that his eminently moral and Puritan criticism of life is softened and brightened by frequent gleams of tenderness. He is an original writer of delicate imagination and profound suggestiveness. His earlier books are indisputably his best; in them especially the characters do quite visibly develop. And in his handling of the dialect of his native district, in its vigour, vivacity, and truth to philology and nature, he has been equalled by no recent kail-yarder. His health was for many years very broken, and his home was mainly on the Riviera. His Alma Mater had given him her honorary degree of LL.D. in 1868; and in 1877 a Civil List pension was conferred on him. Other novels are Adela Cathcart (1864); Wilfrid Cumbermede (1871); Thomas Wingfield, Curate (1876); Paul Faber, Surgeon (1878); What's Mine's Mine, Home Again, Our Elect Lady, and Heather and Snow between 1886 and 1893. Admirable books for the young were Dealings with the Fairies, Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, At the Back of the North Wind, and The Princess and the Goblin, all between 1867 and 1871. Three series of Unspoken Sermons were issued in 1866, 1885, and 1889, and there was a work on The Miracles of Our Lord (1870). Dr Macdonald edited England's Antiphon, studies on English poets; Exotics, translated from Novalis and elsewhere; and Rampolli, also a translation. The Diet of Orts was a miscellany; and Hamlet, a Shakespearian study of originality and power. He collected and arranged his Poetical Works in two volumes in 1893, and issued in 1884 A Work of Fancy and Imagination, ten volumes of poetry and prose idyls. He also assisted his wife with her Chamber Dramas for Children. Walter Chalmers Smith, born in Aberdeen in 1824, studied at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and preached to a Presbyterian church in London ere as a Free Church minister he settled in his first country cure in Kinross-shire. Thence he passed to a charge in Glasgow, and from 1876 till his resignation in 1894 he was a minister in Edinburgh. During these years he published a series of volumes of verse, including The Bishop's Walk, by 'Orwell' (1861); Olrig Grange, by 'Hermann Kunst' (1872); Hilda among the Broken Gods (1878); Raban, or Life Splinters (1880); NorthCountry Folk (1883); Kildrostan, a Dramatic Poem (1884); and A Heretic (1890). These various books were collected in a one-volume edition in 1902, with the addition of some thirty Ballads from Scottish History, on subjects as various as Wishart and Montrose, the Scots abroad and the outlawed Macgregors, the persecuted Jesuits and the kid napped Lady Grange. Dr Smith's poems (he was made D.D. and LL.D.) illustrate in simple, vigorous, homely, and often rather rough, shambling verse 'the varying shades of thought and feeling during the latter part of the nineteenth century;' his singularly catholic temper enabling him to represent with almost equal fairness the true-blue Presbyterian orthodoxy of the olden time, the hard but conscientious unfaith of the modern materialist, and the tolerant and only slightly unorthodox modern Christianity with which he was himself identified. In his works kindly satire, autobiographical reminiscence, exhortation, and encouragement towards a higher life are happily combined with the more directly poetic elements. Thomas Woolner (1826–92), poet-sculptor, was born at Hadleigh, and studied at the Royal Academy from 1842. Already in 1843 his 'Eleanor sucking the Poison from Prince Edward's Wound' attracted much attention; it was followed by a long series of works in sculpture, including statues and portrait-busts of most of his famous contemporaries. He produced in all about a hundred and twenty works, and was successively A.R.A. and R.A. As a conspicuous member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (see the article on Rossetti) he contributed poems to The Germ, which with others were expanded into a volume as My Beautiful Lady (1863; 5th ed. 1892). Other poems were Pygmalion, Silenus, Tiresias, and Nelly Dale. If his sculptures were greatly praised as imaginative. and poetic, it may with equal truth be said that his poems have some of the charms of sculpture-they were picturesque, sincere, and impressive. Walter Horatio Pater (1839-94) was the son of an American of Dutch extraction who had settled as a medical practitioner in Shadwell (not then incorporated with London), but was brought up at Enfield. Neither at school in Canterbury nor at Queen's College, Oxford, did he manifest any exceptional literary gift or impulse, though he attracted Jowett and was stimulated by T. H. Green. He became a Fellow of Brasenose, read with pupils, gave up thoughts of taking Anglican orders, and through Unitarianism passed to a non-Christian scheme of philosophical eclecticism. His home alternated between Oxford in termtime and London. Throughout life he was, in thought as in style, the disciple of no one master. Already in a magazine article on Coleridge in 1866 his singularly polished style is as characteristic as it is in most of his later work. Other remarkable articles on Winckelmann, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and others followed; and when collected and added to in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) attracted even more notice. But Marius the Epicurean (1885) is his principal legacy to the world; though his four Imaginary Portraits (dealing with Watteau amongst the rest), and his Appreciations of Lamb, Wordsworth, Rossetti, Sir Thomas Browne, and Blake, accompanied by a very significant dissertation on style, would have made any writer famous. Gaston de la Tour, an unfinished romance of medieval life, came out in Macmillan's; Emerald Uthwart was partly autobiographical; Plato and Platonism was an eminently suggestive disquisition; and there was. a volume of Miscellaneous Studies (1895). Marius the Epicurean is the life of a noble Roman, the friend of Galen and of Marcus Aurelius, who is profoundly moved by the spiritual problems of that trying period, is attracted by what he sees of Christianity and Christians, and dies a kind of martyr by mistake without any joyous confidence in his own philosophy as a key to the riddle of exist ence. WALTER PATER. From a Photograph. His epicureanism is not that 'of the sty,' nor the book philosophy of the Greek texts, nor the syncretistic scheme of the imperial Romans, nor the revived and negative epicureanism of Gassendi and the Renaissance, but that of the nineteenth-century Englishman who had drunk from the wells of Oxford, had studied Goethe and Ruskin, and had essayed an even higher synthesis of culture and beauty and the spiritual life. Pater's style is unique in English literatureexquisitely polished, perfected as an instrument for expressing every subtlest nuance of thought or feeling, brilliant and yet dignified in phrasing, but complex, over-elaborate, and wanting in directness and buoyancy. Yet the too obvious labor lime hardly detracts from his right to take rank at the head of the stylists of the latter part of the nineteenth century; and Marius was a spiritual maieutic to many of his younger contemporaries. In Mr Gosse's Critical Kit-Kats (1896) there is an interesting article on him. Joseph Skipsey, the miner poet, was born in 1832 near North Shields, and had worked from childhood on the Percy Main Collieries there when in 1859 he printed a few songs. From 1863 he held posts such as librarian or care-taker. Between 1862 and 1892 he published half-a-dozen volumes of good, strong, tuneful verse (one called The Collier Lad, and another Carols from the Coalfields). In some of his poems friendly critics have noted an affinity to Blake. He edited a number of volumes of the 'Canterbury Series '-Blake, Burns, Coleridge, Poe, Shelley. He died in 1903. Gerald Massey was born in 1828 at Gamble Wharf near Tring in Hertfordshire, and as a poor man's child had been earning his livelihood in a silk-factory and as a straw-plaiter ere at fifteen he came to London as a message-boy. Early privations had only invigorated his manhood and sharpened his wits; Christian Socialism and the friendship of Maurice and Kingsley encouraged him to literary efforts, and he contributed to and ultimately edited The Spirit of Freedom. He is believed to have been the original of George Eliot's 'Felix Holt.' His first volume of verse, Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love, appeared in 1851; The Ballad of Babe Christabel, and other Poems, in 1854; and War Waits, Craigcrook Castle, Havelock's March, and A Tale of Eternity gave name to other volumes of poetry. My Lyrical Life (2 vols. 1889) contains an anthology from these works. He lectured on mesmerism and spiritualism; published volumes of an eminently speculative kind on spiritualism, and on the origins of myths and mysteries-The Book of the Beginnings (1881), The Natural Genesis (1883); and interpreted a secret drama out of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1866, 1888). His poetry is unequal, and often harsh and rugged; but it is full of rude vigour, displays a fertile imagination, and has at times a truly lyrical melody. David Wingate (1828-92), the collier-poet, was born at Cowglen near Glasgow, and losing his father by a fire-damp explosion while still a child, descended the pit at the age of nine. He had a strong taste for country rambles and wild-flowers, contributed early verses to the Hamilton Advertiser, and was brought to notice in his twenty-third year by an article written by another Glasgow poet, Hugh Macdonald. His first volume, Poems and Songs, published in 1862, was made the subject of an article by Lord 'Neaves in Blackwood's Magazine; and his next, Annie Weir, in 1866, brought him not only further reputation, but the means of attending the Glasgow School of Mines. He was thus enabled, on the passing of the Coal-Mines Regulation Act in 1872, to assume the position of colliery manager. He had now leisure to contribute poetry and prose tales to a number of magazines and papers, and he published further volumes-Lily Neil, and other Poems (1879), Poems and Songs (1883), and Selected Poems (1890). Nine |