Savannah morning news. [volume] (Savannah) 1868-1887, 1883-08-16
EARLY DEATHS.
Instances OfPrecOcIOus Genius-"Whom
the Gods Love Die Young

London Standard.
list of men and women of genius who
have died at or about the early age of
thirty-seven, and secured for themselves
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 household
possession in every civilized country, have
done all their best work after thirty
seven, and who would never have been
heard of. or at best would have shown
only as the smaller lights of literature. if
they had been carried off 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 thousand others
did after the same age, and how little they
had done before it. we cannot estimate
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 work to the world.
1t is certain that thirty or forty more
years would have cooled the blood of By
ron and carried him out of what we all
know, and what literary history has stig-
matiZed. as ByrOnism; but il is as impOs-
sible 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 development of his splendid
powers during another quarter of a Gen.
fury, 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 literary movements in the air
which might have turned his labor and
his life into a new channel And was
RaphaePs genius exhausted when the
grave closed over him at thirty-seYen:
No more than Michael Angeles would
have been, and some of the sublimest
work of the Tuscan was done in the late
evening of his life.
Miss Austen and Charlotte BrOnte were
rather more than thirty-seyen when they
died, but they died at an age at which
George Eliot had not written a single
novel. Westminster Review and the
"Scenes of Clerical Life were all that
had come from the hand of the subsequent
author of E.Adam Bede'' and |EDaniel
DerOnda." Carlyle mOralizes ON what
might have been the consequence to Eng
lish history if a 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
LiiOI HIS EiiCiItlCN iiSu literature
would have no existence; in other words,
there would have been no George Eliot.
Miss Austen's Observant eye 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 before they
We're much more than boys, and broken
column is the fittest and most suggestive
memorial on their graves. The mysterious
''might have been" in the cases of Keats
and ChattertOn, if they had lived to a ripe
manhood, would have given to English
literature many a noble poem it does not
possess. For it has seldom happened that
poet has exhausted himself in a single
work. Phillip James Bayley did so in
"Festus," and Alexander Smith and
Sidney DObell may be said to
have thoroughly drained their intellects
in one OF two efforts. No length of life
would have enabled any of them to add
greatly to their fame, though they might
have lived on, tanning the embers of their
early reputation. SpOntaneity, energy,
native force, were wanting in them
more almost than in anyEnglish poet above
mediOcrity. So, likewise, Pollock, at
tempting to follow the footsteps of Milton.
had probably attained the highest pima
Gle Of his possibilities in "The Course of
Time" when his shattered constitution
cave way and he sank to his early grave