"The perils that environ
The man who meddles with cold iron;"
and has set a glorious example to future genius—to rely on its own intimations, and not on reviews; to assert the rights of mind, and yet not to neglect business. In him stands a living proof that poetry and worldly prosperity can go hand in hand.
By his own statement to me, it appears that he was born the 17th of March, 1781, being one of eight children. His father was a commercial clerk in the iron-works at Masborough, near Rotherham, with a salary of £70 a-year, "and consequently," says he, "a rich man in those days."
There is no complete biography of Mr. Elliott published, nor ever written. There is one in manuscript, written by himself, but only up to a certain period. Beyond that he has not been able to proceed, and has expressed doubts whether he ever shall. It no doubt relates to some crisis in his life, that from his desperate conflict with circumstances is recollected only with a horror that disables his pen; the bottom of that Jordan of affliction through which he passed, that he might become the interpreter of the sons of suffering. At the very memory of this stern baptism, that Herculean resolution which bore him through it falters; it is to be hoped, for the sake of posterity, one day, however, to collect itself again into a great effort, and to add another autobiography full of life's great lessons to those of Franklin and William Hutton. From a notice in a periodical some years ago, and which I believe, from good authority, to be correct, I extract the few particulars that are related of his early life.
"Ebenezer Elliott, in childhood, boyhood, and youth, was remarkable for good-nature, as it is called, and a sensitiveness, exceeded only by his extreme dullness and inability to learn any thing that required the least application or intellect. His good-nature made him rather a favorite in his childhood with servant girls, nurses, and old women. One of the latter was a particular favorite with him—Nanny Farr, who kept the York Keelman public-house, near the foundry at Masborough, where he was born. She was a walking magazine of old English prejudices and superstitions;—to her he owes his fondness for ghost stories. When he was about ten years old, he fell in love with a young girl, now Mrs. Woodcock of Munsber, near Greasborough, to whom he never to this day spoke one word. She then lived with her father, Mr. Ridgeway, a butcher and publican, close to the bridge on the Masborough side of the river Don. Such was his sensitiveness, that if he happened to see her as she passed, and especially if she happened to look at him—which he now believes she never did,—he was suddenly deprived almost of the power of moving.
"His unconquerable dullness was improved into absolute stupidity by the help he received from an uncommonly clever boy, called John Ross, who did him his sums. He got into the rule-of-three without having learned numeration, addition, subtraction, and division. Old Joseph Ramsbotham seemed quite convinced, gave him up in despair, and at rule-of-three the bard jumped all at once to decimals, where he stuck. At this time he was examined by his father, who discovered that the boy scarcely knew that two and one are three. He was then put to work in the foundry on trial, whether hard labor would not induce him to learn his 'counting,' as arithmetic is called in Yorkshire. Now it happened that nature, in her vagaries, had given him a brother called Giles, of whom it will be said by any person who knew him, that never was there a young person of quicker or brighter talents; there was nothing that he could not learn, but the praise he received ruined him in the end. His superiority produced no envy in Ebenezer, who almost worshiped him. The only effect it produced on him was, a sad sense of humiliation, and confirmed conviction that himself was an incurable dunce. The sense of his deficiencies oppressed him, and in private he wept bitterly. When he saw Giles seated in the counting-house, writing invoices, or posting the ledger; or when he came dirty out of the foundry, and saw him showing his drawings, or reading aloud to the circle, whose plaudits seemed to have no end, his resource was solitude, of which from his infancy he was fond. He would go and fly his kite, always alone, and he was the best kite-maker of the place; or he would saunter along the canal bank, swimming his ships, or anchoring them before his fortresses—and he was a good ship-builder.
"His sadness increased;—he could not post books—he could not write invoices—he could not learn to do what almost every body could learn, namely, to do a single sum in single division; yet by this time he had discovered that he could do 'men's work,' for he could make a frying-pan. It ought to be observed here, that the assistance he received from John Ross accompanied him, like his double, to every school to which his parents, in their despair, had sent him; and they sent him to two, beside Mr. Ramsbotham's. When it was found that he could not do decimals, he was put back to the rule-of-three, and then pronounced incurable. Labor, however, and the honor paid to his brother, at length made him try one effort more. He had an aunt at Masborough, one of whose sons was studying botany. He was buying, in monthly numbers, a book called Sowerby's English Botany, with beautifully colored plates. They filled him with delight; and she showed him that by holding the plates before a pane of glass, he might take exact sketches of them. Dunce though he was, he found he could draw, and with such ease, that he almost thought he was a magician. He became a botanist, or rather a hunter of flowers; but, like his cousin Ben, though not Greek-learned like him, he too had his Hortus Siccus. He does not remember having ever read, or liked, or thought of poetry until he heard his brother recite that passage in Thomson's Spring, which describes the polyanthus and auricula. His first attempt at poetry was an imitation in rhyme of Thomson's Thunder Storm, in which he described a certain flock of sheep running away after they were killed by lightning. Now this came to pass because the rhyme would have it so. His critic, cousin Ben the learned, though the bard most imploringly told him how the miracle happened, nevertheless exercised the critic's privilege, and ridiculed him without mercy. Never will he forget that infliction. His second favorite author was Shenstone, whose translations of passages from the classics, prefixed to his elegies, produced an effect on his mind and heart which death only can obliterate. His next favorite was Milton, who slowly gave way to Shakspeare. He can trace all his literary propensities to physical causes. His mind, he says, is altogether the mind of his own eyes. A primrose is to him a primrose, and nothing more; for Solomon in his glory was not more delicately arrayed. There is not a good passage in his writings, which he can not trace to some real occurrence, or to some object actually before his eyes, or to some passage in some other author. He has the power, he says, of making the thoughts of other men breed; and he is fond of pointing out four or five passages in his poems, all stolen from one passage in Cowper's Homer. We will give the original, and one of the imitations. He made the thought his own, he says, by substituting the word 'hymn' for the word 'trumpet;' and the imitation will show his power of making other men's thoughts breed; they describe poetically and philosophically the reflection of light from the heavenly bodies:
'The earth beneath them trembled, and the heavens
Sung them together with a trumpet's voice.'