BRANTWOOD, CONISTON LAKE
The Home of Harriet Martineau (1855-1876).

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III

A LOVER OF BEAUTY

GERALD MASSEY

'Like the Norseman of whom he sings, he is everywhere true, brave, generous, and free. He is before all things a patriot. He has an intense belief in the genius of England as the champion of liberty, and the pioneer of freedom.'—The Poets and the Poetry of the Century.

HE is still living, some seventy-five years of age, and it is difficult to write anything of the nature of a biography of one still amongst us. There are a few facts, however, patent to all the world, which may be fitly reproduced. Perhaps the most striking of these is that, like 'Festus Bailey,' he did his best poetical work in his young manhood, and the early promise of ripening in power and of richer fruit-bearing has not been fulfilled. Massey, writing some sweet and inspiring lyrics, and giving evidence of acute appreciation of the masters of literature in his once well-known lectures, seems to have lost himself in a maze of Egyptian and anti-Christian pseudo-philosophies even less edifying than the science evolved from the 'inner consciousness' of such holy men as Jacob Behmen, Peter Sterry, or Swedenborg, and as incomprehensible to the ordinary mind as the strange mysticism of William Blake. He has, as a poet, which was his true function in life, committed intellectual suicide, and his resurrection into mythical regions and pamphleteering on 'Luniolatry,' 'The Seven Souls of Man,' 'The Coming Religion,' and other such subjects, will not only fail to add to his fame, but in the future will be remembered merely by curiosity-hunters as the vagaries of a capable but erratic genius. Like his own Atle the Fur-Hunter in chasing the squirrel, he has lost his sledge-load of treasures. I know that he does not personally think so, and that some, at least, of his friends agree with him. He found verse-making insufficient for subsistence—as, indeed, might have been expected—and it has been written of him that in turning to his final career he began to

'Dredge the old sea-bottoms of the Past,
Lover of Beauty who gave up all for Truth.'