ARTHUR O'SHAUGHNESSY. [ARTHUR WILLIAM EDGAR O'SHAUGHNESSY was born on the 14th of March, 1844. He was an ichthyologist by profession, and his entire life, from boyhood to the day of his death, was passed in the service of the British Museum. He died, after a very short illness, from the effects of a neglected cold, on the 30th of January, 1881. He published during his lifetime three volumes of verse, An Epic of Women, 1870; Lays of France, 1872; Music and Moonlight, 1874. His posthumous volume, Songs of a Worker, appeared in 1881.] The same month that saw O'Shaughnessy's death deprived English literature of one of its most vigorous representatives, a woman who had no less ambition than he had to excel in verse. In the chorus of praise and regret which followed George Eliot to the grave, O'Shaughnessy passed away almost unperceived. As far as intellect is concerned he had no claim to be mentioned near her. But in poetry the battle is not always to the strong, and he seems to have possessed, what we all confess that she lacked, the indescribable quality which gives the smallest warbler admission to that forked hill from which Bacon and Hobbes are excluded. In O'Shaughnessy this quality was thin, and soon exhausted. His earliest book had most of it; his posthumous book, which ought never to have been published, had none of it. It was volatile, and evaporated with the passage of youth. But when his work has been thoroughly sifted, there will be found to remain a small residuum of exquisite poetry, full of odour and melody, all in one key, and essentially unlike the verse of anyone else. I have ventured to indicate as the central feature of this poetry its habit of etherealising human feeling, and of looking upon mundane emotion as the broken echo of a subtle and supernatural passion. This is what seems to make O'Shaughnessy's best pieces, such as The Fountain of Tears, Barcarolle, There is an Earthly Glimmer in the Tomb, Song of Betrothal, Outcry, and even, as the reverse of the medal, the were-wolf ballad of Bisclaveret, so delicate and unique. We have nothing else quite like them in English; the Germans had a kindred product in the songs of Novalis. EDMUND W. Gosse. FROM BISCLAVERET.' [Epic of Women.] Now over intervening waste Of lowland drear, and barren wold, I scour, and ne'er assuage my haste, Inflamed with yearnings manifold ; Drinking a distant sound that seems And bitter stifling scents are past And lo, afar, the gradual stir, And rising of the stray wild leaves; The swaying pine, and shivering fir, And windy sound that moans and heaves In first fits, till with utter throes The whole wild forest lolls about; And all the fiercer clamour grows, And all the moan becomes a shout; And mountains near and mountains far Of storms, when shore cries unto shore. But soon, from every hidden lair Beyond the forest tracks, in thick Wild coverts, or in deserts bare, Behold they come,-renewed and quick The splendid fearful herds that stray SONG, [From Lays of France.] Has summer come without the rose, Is the blue changed above thee, Will you change every flower that grows, The skies seemed true above thee; The bird seemed true the summer through ; Life, love, or death-or what? Since lips that sang I love thee I think the sun's kiss will scarce fall I think the bird will miss me, Be false or fair above me; You cannot change one place The grass, the leaves, the earth, the dew, The grave I make the spot, Here where she used to love me, SONG. [From Music and Moonlight.] I made another garden, yea, For my new love; I left the dead rose where it lay, Why did the summer not begin? Why did my heart not haste? She entered with her weary smile, She looked around a little while, Her passing touch was death to all, Her pale robe, clinging to the grass That bit the grass and ground, alas! She went up slowly to the gate; She turned back at the last to wait, DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. [DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, poet and painter, was born in London, in the year 1828; his father, by birth and education an Italian, being distinguished as a curious commentator upon Dante. He became in early youth a student of painting, in which art, though never a public exhibitor, he grew steadily to fame as an imaginative designer and a colourist of the highest rank. With two years of wedded life (1860-1862) and with some intimate friendships, he passed his days in much seclusion; residing from the year 1863 chiefly at an old and picturesque house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. In 1861 he published Translations from the Early Italian Poets; in 1870 Poems; and in 1881 Ballads and Sonnets. After a period of failing health he died at Birchington-on-Sea, on Easter Day, 1882. The student of his life and work should consult Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by T. Hall Caine; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a Record and a Study, by William Sharp; and, in the Nineteenth Century, March 1883, The Truth about Rossetti, by Theodore Watts.] It was characteristic of a poet who had ever something about him of mystic isolation, and will still appeal perhaps, though with a name it may seem now established in English literature, to a special and limited audience, that some of his poems had won a kind of exquisite fame before they were in the full sense published. The Blessed Damozel, although actually printed twice before the year 1870, was eagerly circulated in manuscript; and the volume which it now opens came at last to satisfy a long-standing curiosity as to the poet, whose pictures also had become an object of the same peculiar kind of interest. For those poems were the work of a painter, understood to belong to, and to be indeed the leader, of a new school then rising into note; and the reader of to-day may observe already, in The Blessed Damozel, written at the age of eighteen, a prefigurement of the chief characteristics of that school, as he will recognise in it also, in proportion as he really knows Rossetti, many of the characteristics which are most markedly personal and his own. Common to that school and to him, and in both alike of primary significance, was the |