Northern tribune. [volume] (Cheboygan, Mich.) 1875-1885, 1883-10-13
Early Deaths.


who have died at or about the early age
Of thirty-seven, and secured for them.
selves an undisputed place in the ranks
of the immortals, would occupy not the
least brilliant portion of the record Of
the illustrious dead. 1t is astonishing
how many men, whose names are q
household possession in every civilized
country, have done all their best work
after thirty and who never would
have been heard of, or at best would
have shown only as the smaller lights of
literature, if they had been carried of
at the age at which Byron, Shelley,
Burns and Raphael closed their careers.
And when we come to look at what
Milton did after thirty-seven, what
Goethe and a thousand others did after
the same age, and how little they had
done before it, we cannot estimate how
mYch richer the world might have been
had those bright intellects which were
cut off in their earliest prime, been per-
mitted to give thirty or forty years Of
additional work to the world.
1t is certain that thirty or forty more
years would have cooled the blood OF
Byron and carried him out of what we
all know and what literary history has
stigmatized as Byronism; but it is i'm
possible to forecast what would have
been the result as to predict from
Werther the development that ended in
Faust" Who can foresee what Shelley
would have done in the full develop.
ment of his splendid powers during an
other quarter of century, and if he had
died, say at the age of Shakespeare
Burns, too, we know, dreamed of great
works, and when he died there was lit.
erary movements in the air which might
have turned his labor and his life into
new channel. And was Raphaels genius
exhausted when the grave closed over
him at thirty-sevenp No more than
Michael Angeles would have been, and
some of the sublimest work of the Tus.
can was done in the late evening of his
life.
Miss Austen and Charlotte Bronte
were rather more than thirty-seven
when they died, but they died at an
age at which George Eliot had not
written single novel. Westminster
Review and the "Scenes of Clerical
Life were all that had come from the
hand of the subsequent author of ''Adam
Bede" and 'Daniel Deronda." Carlyle
moralizes on what might have been the
consequence to English history if
stray bullet had struck down Oliver
Cromwell. Perhaps they would not be
so great as he imagined, and might
have proved to be nothing more than
an earlier restoration. But, given a
fatal chill or fever at thirty-seven, and
the long series of works with which
George Eliot has encircled English liter
AZURE would have no existence; in other
words, there would have been no George
Eliot. Miss Austen's observant eve
had not grown dim nor her facile pen
been robbed of its cunning when her
life terminated; and the world knows
not how many more photographs of
simple English character and manners
it has thus lost.
We might instance Keats also, and
Kirk, White and Chatterton; but one
died in his boyhood and the others be-
fore they were much more than boys,
and a broken column is the fittest and
most suggestive memorial on their
graves. The mysterious might have
been" in the cases of Keats and Chat
terton, if they had lived to ripe man.
hood, would have given to English
literature many noble poem it does
not now possess. For it has seldom
that a poet has exhausted
himself in single work. Philip James
Bayley did so in "Festus," and Alex
ander Smith and Sidney Dubell may be
said to have thoroughly drained their
ntellects in one or two efforts. No
length of life would have enabled any
Of them to add greatly to their fame,
though they might have lived on, fan
ming the embers of their early reputa-
ton. Spontanity, energy, native force
we're wanting in them more almost than
in any English poet above mediocrity.
So, likewise, Pollock, attempting to fol-
low the footsteps of Milton, had proba-
bly, attained the highest pinnacle of his
in "The Course of Time,"
when his shattered constitution gave
way and he sank to his early grave
London Standard.
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