Kitabı oku: «A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)», sayfa 8

Even during his life Hogg underwent a curious process of mythop[oe]ia at the hands of Wilson and the other wits of Blackwood's Magazine, who made him – partly with his own consent, partly not – into the famous "Ettrick Shepherd" of the Noctes Ambrosianæ. "The Shepherd" has Hogg's exterior features and a good many of his foibles, but is endowed with considerably more than his genius. Even in his published and acknowledged works, which are numerous, it is not always quite easy to be sure of his authorship; for he constantly solicited, frequently received, and sometimes took without asking, assistance from Lockhart and others. But enough remains that is different from the work of any of his known or possible coadjutors to enable us to distinguish his idiosyncrasy pretty well. In verse he was a very fluent and an exceedingly unequal writer, who in his long poems chiefly, and not too happily, followed Scott, but who in the fairy poem of "Kilmeny" displayed an extraordinary command of a rare form of poetry, and who has written some dozens of the best songs in the language. The best, but only a few of the best, of these are "Donald Macdonald," "Donald M'Gillavry," "The Village of Balmanhapple," and the "Boy's Song." In prose he chiefly attempted novels, which have no construction at all, and few merits of dialogue or style, but contain some powerful passages; while one of them, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, if it is entirely his, which is very doubtful, is by far the greatest thing he wrote, being a story of diablerie very well designed, wonderfully fresh and enthralling in detail, and kept up with hardly a slip to the end. His other chief prose works are entitled The Brownie of Bodsbeck, The Three Perils of Man, The Three Perils of Woman, and Altrive Tales, while he also wrote some important, and in parts very offensive, but also in parts amusing, Recollections of Sir Walter Scott. His verse volumes, no one of which is good throughout, though hardly one is without good things, were The Mountain Bard, The Queen's Wake, Mador of the Moor, The Pilgrims of the Sun, Jacobite Relics (some of the best forged by himself), Queen Hynde, and The Border Garland.

A greater writer, if his work be taken as a whole, than any who has been mentioned since Keats, was Walter Savage Landor, much of whose composition was in prose, but who was so alike in prose and verse that the whole had better be noticed together here. Landor (who was of a family of some standing in Warwickshire, and was heir to considerable property, much of which he wasted later by selling his inheritance and buying a large but unprofitable estate in Wales) was born at Ipsley Court, in 1775. He went to school at Rugby, and thence to Trinity College, Oxford, at both of which places he gained considerable scholarship but was frequently in trouble owing to the intractable and headstrong temper which distinguished him through life. He was indeed rusticated from his college, and subsequently, owing to his extravagant political views, was refused a commission in the Warwickshire Militia. He began to write early, but the poem of Gebir, which contains in germ or miniature nearly all his characteristics of style, passed almost unnoticed by the public, though it was appreciated by good wits like Southey and De Quincey. After various private adventures he came into his property and volunteered in the service of Spain, where he failed, as usual, from impracticableness. In 1811, recklessly as always, he married a very young girl of whom he knew next to nothing, and the marriage proved anything but a happy one. The rest of his long life was divided into three residences: first with his family at Florence; then, when he had quarrelled with his wife, at Bath; and lastly (when he had been obliged to quit Bath and England owing to an outrageous lampoon on one lady, which he had written, as he conceived, in chivalrous defence of another) at Florence again. Here he died in September 1864, aged very nearly ninety.

Landor's poetical productions, which are numerous, are spread over the greater part of his life; his prose, by which he is chiefly known, dates in the main from the last forty years of it, the best being written between 1820 and 1840. The greater part of this prose takes the form of "Imaginary Conversations" – sometimes published under separate general headings, sometimes under the common title – between characters of all ages, from the classical times to Landor's. Their bulk is very great; their perfection of style at the best extraordinary, and on the whole remarkably uniform; their value, when considerations of matter are added to that of form, exceedingly unequal. For in them Landor not only allowed the fullest play to the ungovernable temper and the childish crotchets already mentioned, but availed himself of his opportunities (for, though he endeavoured to maintain a pretence of dramatic treatment, his work is nearly as personal as that of Byron) to deliver his sentiments on a vast number of subjects, sometimes without too much knowledge, and constantly with a plentiful lack of judgment. In politics, in satiric treatment, and especially in satiric treatment of politics, he is very nearly valueless. But his intense familiarity with and appreciation of classical subjects gave to almost all his dealings with them a value which, for parallel reasons, is also possessed by those touching Italy. And throughout this enormous collection of work (which in the compactest edition fills five large octavo volumes in small print), whensoever the author forgets his crotchets and his rages, when he touches on the great and human things, his utterance reaches the very highest water-mark of English literature that is not absolutely the work of supreme genius.

For supreme genius Landor had not. His brain was not a great brain, and he did not possess the exquisite alertness to his own weaknesses, or the stubborn knack of confinement to things suitable to him, which some natures much smaller than the great ones have enjoyed. But he had the faculty of elaborate style – of style elaborated by a careful education after the best models and vivified by a certain natural gift – as no one since the seventeenth century had had it, and as no one except Mr. Ruskin and the late Mr. Pater has had since. Also, he was as much wider in his range and more fertile in his production than Mr. Pater as he was more solidly grounded on the best models than Mr. Ruskin. Where Landor is quite unique is in the apparent indifference with which he was able to direct this gift of his into the channels of prose and poetry – a point on which he parts company from both the writers to whom he has been compared, and in which his only analogue, so far as I am able to judge, is Victor Hugo. The style of no Englishman is so alike in the two harmonies as is that of Landor. And it is perhaps not surprising that, this being the case, he shows at his best in prose when he tries long pieces, in verse when he tries short ones. Some of Landor's prose performances in Pericles and Aspasia, in the Pentameron (where Boccaccio and Petrarch are the chief interlocutors), and in not a few of the separate conversations, are altogether unparalleled in any other language, and not easy to parallel in English. They are never entirely or perfectly natural; there is always a slight "smell of the lamp," but of a lamp perfumed and undying. The charm is so powerful, the grace so stately, that it is impossible for any one to miss it who has the faculty of recognising charm and grace at all. In particular, Landor is remarkable – and, excellent as are many of the prose writers whom we have had since, he is perhaps the most remarkable – for the weight, the beauty, and the absolute finish of his phrase. Sometimes these splendid phrases do not mean very much; occasionally they mean nothing or nonsense. But their value as phrase survives, and the judge in such things is often inclined and entitled to say that there is none like them.

This will prepare the reader who has some familiarity with literature for what is to be said about Landor's verse. It always has a certain quality of exquisiteness, but this quality is and could not but be unequally displayed in the short poems and the long. The latter can hardly attain, with entirely competent and impartial judges, more than a success of esteem. Gebir is couched in a Miltonic form of verse (very slightly shot and varied by Romantic admixture) which, as is natural to a young adventurer, caricatures the harder and more ossified style of the master. Sometimes it is great; more usually it intends greatness. The "Dialogues in Verse" (very honestly named, for they are in fact rather dialogues in verse than poems), though executed by the hand of a master both of verse and dialogue, differ in form rather than in fact from the Conversations in prose. The Hellenics are mainly dialogues in verse with a Greek subject. All have a quality of nobility which may be sought in vain in almost any other poet; but all have a certain stiffness and frigidity, some a certain emptiness. They are never plaster, as some modern antiques have been; but they never make the marble of which they are composed wholly flesh. Landor was but a half-Pygmalion.

The vast collection of his miscellaneous poems contains many more fortunate attempts, some of which have, by common consent of the fittest, attained a repute which they are never likely to lose. "Rose Aylmer" and "Dirce," trifles in length as both of them are, are very jewels of poetic quality. And among the hundreds and almost thousands of pieces which Landor produced there are some which come not far short of these, and very many which attain a height magnificent as compared with the ordinary work of others. But the hackneyed comparison of amber does something gall this remarkable poet and writer. Everything, great and small, is enshrined in an imperishable coating of beautiful style; but the small things are somewhat out of proportion to the great, and, what is more, the amber itself always has a certain air of being deliberately and elaborately produced – not of growing naturally. Landor – much more than Dryden, of whom he used the phrase, but in the same class as Dryden – is one of those who "wrestle with and conquer time." He has conquered, but it is rather as a giant of celestial nurture than as an unquestioned god.

Even after enumerating these two sets of names – the first all of the greatest, and the greatest of the second, Landor, equalling the least of the first – we have not exhausted the poetical riches of this remarkable period. It is indeed almost dangerous to embark on the third class of poets; yet its members here would in some cases have been highly respectable earlier, and even at this time deserve notice either for influence, or for intensity of poetic vein, or sometimes for the mere fact of having been once famous and having secured a "place in the story." The story of literature has no popular ingratitude; and, except in the case of distinct impostors, it turns out with reluctance those who have once been admitted to it. Sometimes even impostors deserve a renewal of the brand, if not a freshening up of the honourable inscription.

The first of this third class in date, and perhaps the first in influence, though far indeed from being the first in merit, was William Lisle Bowles, already once or twice referred to. He was born on 24th September 1762; so that, but for the character and influence of his verse, he belongs to the last chapter rather than to this. Educated at Winchester, and at Trinity College, Oxford, he took orders, and spent nearly the last half century of his very long life (he did not die till 1850) in Wiltshire, as Prebendary of Salisbury and Rector of Bremhill. It was in the year of the French Revolution that he published his Fourteen Sonnets [afterwards enlarged in number], written chiefly on Picturesque Spots during a Journey. These fell early into Coleridge's hands; he copied and recopied them for his friends when he was a blue-coat boy, and in so far as poetical rivers have any single source, the first tricklings of the stream which welled into fulness with the Lyrical Ballads, and some few years later swept all before it, may be assigned to this very feeble fount. For in truth it is exceedingly feeble. In the fifth edition (1796), which lies before me exquisitely printed, with a pretty aquatint frontispiece by Alken, and a dedication of the previous year to Dean Ogle of Winchester, the Sonnets have increased to twenty-seven, and are supplemented by fifteen "miscellaneous pieces." One of these latter is itself a sonnet "written at Southampton," and in all respects similar to the rest. The others – "On Leaving Winchester," "On the Death of Mr. Headley" the critic, a man of worth,⁸ "To Mr. Burke on his Reflections," and so forth – are of little note. The same may be said of Bowles' later poetical productions, which were numerous; but his edition of Pope, finished in 1807, brought about a hot controversy not yet forgotten (nor, to tell the truth, quite settled) on the question Whether Pope was a poet? That Bowles can have had scant sympathy with Pope is evident from the very first glance at the famous sonnets themselves. Besides their form, which, as has been said, was of itself something of a reactionary challenge, they bear strong traces of Gray, and still stronger traces of the picturesque mania which was at the same time working so strongly in the books of Gilpin and others. But their real note is the note which, ringing in Coleridge's ear, echoed in all the poetry of the generation, the note of unison between the aspect of nature and the thought and emotion of man. In the sonnets "At Tynemouth," "At Bamborough Castle," and indeed in all, more or less, there is first the attempt to paint directly what the eye sees, not the generalised and academic view of the type-scene by a type-poet which had been the fashion for so long; and secondly, the attempt to connect this vision with personal experience, passion, or meditation. Bowles does not do this very well, but he tries to do it; and the others, seeing him try, went and did it.

His extreme importance as an at least admitted "origin" has procured him notice somewhat beyond his real deserts; over others we must pass more rapidly. Robert Bloomfield, born in 1760, was one of those unfortunate "prodigy" poets whom mistaken kindness encourages. He was the son of a tailor, went early to agricultural labour, and then became a shoemaker. His Farmer's Boy, an estimable but much overpraised piece, was published in 1800, and he did other things later. He died mad, or nearly so, in 1823 – a melancholy history repeated pretty closely a generation later by John Clare. Clare, however, was a better poet than Bloomfield, and some of the "Poems written in an Asylum" have more than merely touching merit. James Montgomery,⁹ born at Irvine on 4th November 1771, was the son of a Moravian minister, and intended for his father's calling. He, however, preferred literature and journalism, establishing himself chiefly at Sheffield, where he died as late as 1854 (30th April). He had, as editor of the Sheffield Iris, some troubles with the law, and in 1835 was rewarded with a pension. Montgomery was a rather copious and fairly pleasing minor bard, no bad hand at hymns and short occasional pieces, and the author of longer things called The Wanderer of Switzerland, The West Indies, The World before the Flood, and The Pelican Island. Bernard Barton, an amiable Quaker poet, will probably always be remembered as the friend and correspondent of Charles Lamb; perhaps also as the father-in-law of Edward FitzGerald. His verse commended itself both to Southey (who had a kindly but rather disastrous weakness for minor bards) and to Byron, but has little value. Barton died in 1849.

The same pair of enemies joined in praising Henry Kirke White, who was born in 1785 and died when barely twenty-one. Here indeed Southey's unsurpassed biographical skill enforced the poetaster's merit in a charming Memoir, which assisted White's rather pathetic story. He was the son of a butcher, a diligent but reluctant lawyer's clerk, an enthusiastic student, a creditable undergraduate at St. John's, Cambridge, and a victim of consumption. All this made his verse for a time popular. But he really deserved the name just affixed to him: he was a poetaster, and nothing more. The "genius" attributed to him in Byron's well-known and noble though rather rhetorical lines may be discovered on an average in about half a dozen poets during any two or three years of any tolerable poetic period. His best things are imitations of Cowper in his sacred mood, such as the familiar "Star of Bethlehem," and even these are generally spoilt by some feebleness or false note. At his worst he is not far from Della Crusca.¹⁰

In the same year with Kirke White was born a much better poet, and a much robuster person in all ways, mental and physical. Allan Cunningham was a Dumfriesshire man born in the lowest rank, and apprenticed to a stone-mason, whence in after years he rose to be Chantrey's foreman. Cunningham began – following a taste very rife at the time – with imitated, or to speak plainly, forged ballads; but the merit of them deserved on true grounds the recognition it obtained on false, and he became a not inconsiderable man of letters of all work. His best known prose work is the "Lives of the Painters." In verse he is ranked, as a song writer in Scots, by some next to Burns, and by few lower than Hogg. Some of his pieces, such as "Fair shines the sun in France," have the real, the inexplicable, the irresistible song-gift. Cunningham, who was the friend of many good men and was liked by all of them, died on 29th October 1842. His elder by eleven years, Robert Tannahill, who was born in 1774 and died (probably by suicide) in 1810, deserves a few lines in this tale of Scots singers. Tannahill, like Cunningham in humble circumstances originally, never became more than a weaver. His verse has not the gusto of Allan or of Hogg, but is sweet and tender enough. William Motherwell too, as much younger than Allan as Tannahill was older (he was born in 1797 and died young in 1835), deserves mention, and may best receive it here. He was a Conservative journalist, an antiquary of some mark, and a useful editor of Minstrelsy. Of his original work, "Jeanie Morrison" is the best known; and those who have read, especially if they have read it in youth, "The Sword Chant of Thorstein Raudi," will not dismiss it as Wardour Street; while he did some other delightful things. Earlier (1812) the heroicomic Anster Fair of William Tennant (1784-1848) received very high and deserved no low praise; while William Thom, a weaver like Tannahill, who was a year younger than Motherwell and lived till 1848, wrote many simple ballads in the vernacular, of which the most touching are perhaps "The Song of the Forsaken" and "The Mitherless Bairn."

To return to England, Bryan Waller Procter, who claimed kindred with the poet from whom he took his second name, was born in 1790, went to Harrow, and, becoming a lawyer, was made a Commissioner of Lunacy. He did not die till 1874; and he, and still more his wife, were the last sources of direct information about the great race of the first third of the century. He was, under the pseudonym of "Barry Cornwall," a fluent verse writer of the so-called cockney school, and had not a little reputation, especially for songs about the sea and things in general. They still, occasionally from critics who are not generally under the bondage of traditional opinion, receive high praise, which the present writer is totally unable to echo. A loyal junior friend to Lamb, a wise and kindly senior to Beddoes, liked and respected by many or by all, Procter, as a man, must always deserve respect. If and things like it are poetry, I admit myself, with a sad humility, to be wholly destitute of poetical appreciation.

 
The sea, the sea, the open sea,
The blue, the fresh, the ever free,
 

The Church of England contributed two admirable verse writers of this period in Henry Cary and Reginald Heber. Cary, who was born in 1772 and was a Christ Church man, was long an assistant librarian in the British Museum. His famous translation of the Divina Commedia, published in 1814, is not only one of the best verse translations in English, but, after the lapse of eighty years, during which the study of Dante has been constantly increasing in England, in which poetic ideas have changed not a little, and in which numerous other translations have appeared, still attracts admiration from all competent scholars for its combination of fidelity and vigour. Heber, born in 1783 and educated at Brasenose, gained the Newdigate with Palestine, a piece which ranks with Timbuctoo and a few others among unforgotten prize poems. He took orders, succeeding to the family living of Hodnet, and for some years bid fair to be one of the most shining lights of the English Church, combining admirable parochial work with good literature, and with much distinction as a preacher. Unfortunately he thought it his duty to take the Bishopric of Calcutta when it was offered him; and, arriving there in 1824, worked incessantly for nearly two years and then died. His Journal in India is very pleasant reading, and some of his hymns rank with the best in English.

Ebenezer Elliott, the "Corn-Law Rhymer," was born in Yorkshire on 7th March 1781. His father was a clerk in an iron-foundry. He himself was early sent to foundry work, and he afterwards became a master-founder at Sheffield. From different points of view it may be thought a palliation – and the reverse – of the extreme virulence with which Elliott took the side of workmen against landowners and men of property, that he attained to affluence himself as an employer, and was never in the least incommoded by the "condition-of-England" question. He early displayed a considerable affection for literature, and was one, and about the last, of the prodigies whom Southey, in his inexhaustible kindness for struggling men of letters, accepted. Many years later the Laureate wrote good-naturedly to Wynn: "I mean to read the Corn-Law Rhymer a lecture, not without some hope, that as I taught him the art of poetry I may teach him something better." The "something better" was not in Elliott's way; for he is a violent and crude thinker, with more smoke than fire in his violence, though not without generosity of feeling now and then, and with a keen admiration of the scenery – still beautiful in parts, and then exquisite – which surrounded the smoky Hades of Sheffield. He himself acknowledges the influence of Crabbe and disclaims that of Wordsworth, from which the cunning may anticipate the fact that he is deeply indebted to both. His earliest publication or at least composition, "The Vernal Walk," is said to date from the very year of the Lyrical Ballads, and of course owes no royalty to Wordsworth, but is in blank verse, a sort of compound of Thomson and Crabbe. "Love" (in Crabbian couplets slightly tinged with overlapping) and "The Village Patriarch" (still smacking of Crabbe in form, though irregularly arranged in rhymed decasyllables) are his chief other long poems. He tried dramas, but he is best known by his "Corn-Law Rhymes" and "Corn-Law Hymns," and deserves to be best known by a few lyrics of real beauty, and many descriptions. How a man who could write "The Wonders of the Lane" and "The Dying Boy to the Sloe Blossom" could stoop to malignant drivel about "palaced worms," "this syllabub-throated logician," and so forth, is strange enough to understand, especially as he had no excuse of personal suffering. Even in longer poems the mystery is renewed in "They Met Again" and "Withered Wild Flowers" compared with such things as "The Ranter," though the last exhibits the author at both his best and worst. However, Elliott is entitled to the charity he did not show; and the author of such clumsy Billingsgate as "Arthur Bread-Tax Winner," "Faminton," and so forth, may be forgiven for the flashes of poetry which he exhibits. Even in his political poems they do not always desert him, and his somewhat famous Chartist (or ante-Chartist) "Battle-Song" is as right-noted as it is wrong-headed.

Sir Aubrey de Vere (1788-1846), a poet and the father of a poet still alive, was a friend and follower of Wordsworth, and the author of sonnets good in the Wordsworthian kind. But he cannot be spared much room here; nor can much even be given to the mild shade of a poetess far more famous in her day than he. "Time that breaks all things," according to the dictum of a great poet still living, does not happily break all in literature; but it is to be feared that he has reduced to fragments the once not inconsiderable fame of Felicia Hemans. She was born (her maiden name was Felicia Dorothea Browne) at Liverpool on 25th September 1794, and when she was only eighteen she married a Captain Hemans. It was not a fortunate union, and by far the greater part of Mrs. Hemans' married life was spent, owing to no known fault of hers, apart from her husband. She did not live to old age, dying on 26th April 1835. But she wrote a good deal of verse meanwhile – plays, poems, "songs of the affections," and what not. Her blameless character (she wrote chiefly to support her children) and a certain ingenuous tenderness in her verse, saved its extreme feebleness from severe condemnation in an age which was still avid of verse rather than discriminating in it; and children still learn "The boy stood on the burning deck," and other things. It is impossible, on any really critical scheme, to allow her genius; but she need not be spoken of with any elaborate disrespect, while it must be admitted that her latest work is her best – always a notable sign. "Despondency and Aspiration," dating from her death-year, soars close to real sublimity; and of her smaller pieces "England's Dead" is no vulgar thing.

Between the death of Byron and the distinct appearance of Tennyson and the Brownings there was a kind of interregnum or twilight of poetry, of which one of its strangest if not least illuminative stars or meteors, Beddoes, has given a graphic but uncomplimentary picture in a letter: "owls' light" he calls it, with adjuncts. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; Scott, Campbell, and Moore, were all living, but the poetic production of all had on the whole ceased. Shelley and Keats would have been in time the natural, and in genius the more than sufficient sun and moon of the time; but they had died before Byron. So the firmament was occupied by rather wandering stars: some of them elders already noticed, others born in the ten or twelve years between Keats (1795) and the eldest of the Tennysons (1807). The chief of these were the pair of half-serious, half-humorous singers, Hood and Praed. Next in public estimation come Talfourd, Hartley Coleridge, Macaulay, Sir Henry Taylor, the Irish poet Mangan, R. H. Horne, and the first Lord Lytton; while a third class – of critics' rather than readers' favourites – varying in merit, but, at the best of the best of them, ranking higher than any of the above, may be made up of George Darley, C. J. Wells, the Dorsetshire poet Barnes, Beddoes, Charles Whitehead, R. S. Hawker, and Thomas Wade. To the second class must be added "L. E. L.," the poetess who filled the interval between Mrs. Hemans and Mrs. Browning.

Wells, Whitehead, and Wade may be dismissed without disrespect as, if not critical mares'-nests, at any rate critical hobbies. Persons of more or less distinction (and of less or more crotchet) have at different times paid very high compliments to the Joseph and his Brethren (1823, revised later) of Charles Jeremiah Wells (1800-1879), a friend of Keats, and a person who seems to have lived much as he pleased; to the Solitary of Charles Whitehead (1804-1862), a Bohemian ne'er-do-weel, who also showed talent as a novelist and miscellanist; and to the Mundi et Cordis Carmina (1835) of Thomas Wade (1805-1875), a playwright and journalist. Of the three, Wade appears to me to have had the greatest poetical talent. But I do not think that any one who on the one hand uses epithets in poetical criticism with caution, and on the other has read a great deal of minor poetry as it appears, could put any one of them very high. All were born late enough to breathe the atmosphere of the new poetry young; all had poetical velleities, and a certain amount, if not of originality, of capacity to write poetry. But they were not poets; they were only poetical curiosities.

Darley, Beddoes, and Horne belong in the main to the same class, but rise high, in one case immeasurably, above them. George Darley (1795-1846) is perhaps our chief English example of "the poet who dies in youth while the man survives," and who becomes a critic. In him, however, the generation of the critic did not wait for the corruption of the poet. An Irishman, and of Trinity College, Dublin, he was one of the staff of the London Magazine, and wrote much verse bad and good, including the once famous "I've been Roaming," of which it is safe to say that not one in ten of those who have sung it could tell the author. His best work is contained in the charming pastoral drama of Sylvia (1827) and the poem entitled Nepenthe (1839). He was a good but rather a savage critic, and edited Beaumont and Fletcher. His work has never been collected, nor, it is believed, ever fully published; and it has the marks of a talent that never did what was in it to do, and came at an unfortunate time. Some not bad judges in the forties ranked Darley with Tennyson in poetic possibilities, and thought the former the more promising of the two.

Except Donne, there is perhaps no English poet more difficult to write about, so as to preserve the due pitch of enthusiasm on the one hand and criticism on the other, than Thomas Lovell Beddoes, born at Clifton on 20th July 1803. He was the son of a very famous physician, and of Anna Edgeworth, the youngest sister of the whole blood to the novelist. Beddoes, left fatherless at six years old, was educated at the Charterhouse and at Pembroke College, Oxford, and when he was barely of age went to Germany to study medicine, living thenceforth almost entirely on the Continent. Before this he had published two volumes, The Improvisatore and The Bride's Tragedy; but his principal work is a wild Elizabethan play called Death's Jest-Book or The Fool's Tragedy, which he never absolutely finished. He died in 1848 at Basle by a complicated and ghastly kind of suicide. Three years later his Poems appeared, and they have been recently republished, with additions and a curious collection of letters.