The Valley Virginian. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1865-1895, 1883-06-21
Short Lived Genius.
THE EARLY AGE AT WHICH MANY WRIT
ERS HAVE DIED.

A list of the men and women OF genius
who have died at OF about the early age OF.
thirty-sever, and secured for Themselves
an undisputed place in the ranks Of the
immortal, would occupy not the least bril-
liant portion Of the record Of the illustri- |
Gus dead. 1t is astonishing how many men |
whose names are household possession in
every civilized country, have done all their
best work after thirty-seyen, and who
would never have been heard of, OF, at best. |
would have shone only as the smaller lights
of literature, if they had been carried off
at the age 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 1000
others did after the same age, and how lit
tie they had done before it, we cannot esti-
mate how much richer the world might
have been had those bright intellects which
were cut off in their earliest prime, been
permitted. to give thirty or forty years OF
additional labor to the world.
1t is certain that thirty OF 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 as impossible to
forecast what would have been the result
as to predict from Werther the develop
ment that ended in Faust" Who can
foresee what Shelley would have done, in
the full ripeness of his splendid power, dur
ing another 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 were litera-
ry movements in the air which might have
turned his labors and his life into a new
channel. And was Raphael's genius eX-
hausted when the grave closed over him at
thirty-seven? No more than Michael An
gelo's would have been, and some of the
sublimest work of the great Tuscan was
done in the late evening of his life.
Miss Austen and Charlotte Bronte were
rather more than thirty-seven when they
died at an age at which George Eliot had
not written single novel. One OF two
translations, an essay OF two in the West
minister 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 consequences
to English history if a stray bullet had
struck down Oliver Cromwell. Perhaps
they would not be as great as he imagined,
and might have proved to be nothing more
than earlier Restoration. But given a ia
tai chill OF fever at thirty seven, and the
long series of works with which George
Eliot has enriched English literature would
have no existence in other words, there
would have been no George Eliot. Miss
Ansten's observant eye had not grown dim
nor her facile pen been robbed of its cum
ming, when her life terminated ; and the
world knows not how many more photo
graphs of simple English character and
manners it has thus lost.
We might instance Keats also, and Kirk
White and Chatteron, but one died in his
boyhood and the others before they were
much more than boys, and a broken col
umn is the fittest and most suggestive me-
mortal over their graves. The mysterious
might have been,n in the cases Of Keats
and Chatterton, if they had lived tilla ripe
manhood, would have given to English
literature many noble poem it does not
now possess. For it has seldom happened
that poet has exhausted himself in sim
gle work. Philip James Bayley did in
''Festus, and Alexander Smith and i'd
ney Dobell may be said to have thoroughly
drained their intellects in one OF two eff
forts. No length of life would have en-
abled any of them to add greatly to their
fame, though they might have lived on,
tanning the embers of their early reputa-
!. ton, Spontaneity, energy, native force,
were wanting in them more than any En-
glish poet above mediocrity. So, likewise,
Pollock attempting to follow in the foot
steps of Milton, had probably attained the
highest pinnacle of his possibilities in 1.-The
Course of Time" when his shattered con-
stitution gave way and he sank to his early
OraVa