Poet; born at Nottingham, England, Mar. 21, 1785; was the son of a butcher; was apprenticed to a stocking-weaver, and afterwards to an attorney, in whose office he found time to study the classics and several modern languages, as well as English literature, drawing, and music; began to write verses for magazines in his fifteenth year; gained several prizes offered by publishers of periodicals; printed a volume, “Clifton Grove, a Sketch in Verse, with other Poems” (1803), which won for him the high regard of Southey and other men of letters, by whom he was encouraged to study for the ministry; obtained a sizarship at St. John’s College, Cambridge, 1804; was for two years at the head of his class, and became a tutor in mathematics, but destroyed his health by excessive study, and died of consumption at Cambridge, Oct. 19, 1806. His papers were placed in the hands of Southey, who published his “Remains, etc., with an Account of his Life” (2 vols., 1807; vol. III., 1822), which obtained for him a permanent place in English literature.

Personal

  The books which I now read with attention, are Blackstone, Knox’s “Essays,” Plutarch, Chesterfield’s “Letters,” four large volumes, Virgil, Homer and Cicero, and several others…. I have finished Rollin’s “Ancient History,” Blair’s “Lectures,” Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” Hume’s “England” and “British Nepos” lately…. With a little drudgery, I read Italian—Have got some good Italian works, as “Pastor Fido,” etc. I taught myself, and have got a grammar.

  It is not possible to conceive a human being more amiable in all the relations of life. He was the confidential friend and adviser of every member of his family; this he instinctively became; and the thorough good sense of his advice is not less remarkable, than the affection with which it is always communicated. To his mother he is as earnest in beseeching her to be careful of her health, as he is in labouring to convince her that his own complaints were abating; his letters to her are always of hopes, of consolation, and of love. To Neville he writes with the most brotherly intimacy, still, however, in that occasional tone of advice which it was his nature to assume, not from any arrogance of superiority, but from earnestness of pure affection. To his younger brother he addresses himself like the tenderest and wisest parent; and to two sisters, then too young for any other communication, he writes to direct their studies, to enquire into their progress, to encourage and to improve them.

  I have been very much interested lately with the “Remains” of H. K. White, which, however, left a very melancholy impression on my mind. Was there no patron for such a man but Simeon and Wilberforce, who, with the best intentions in the world, seem to have encouraged his killing himself by religious enthusiasm? I am afraid that sort of people do not recollect that enthusiasm, like other potent draughts, should be tempered to the strength of the patient. A dram which hardly warms the veins of a rough-nerved Scotchman will drive to frenzy a more sensitive system. I wish Simeon and Levi would confine their operations to hard-headed Cantabs, and make no excursions to Nottingham for crimping young poets.

  Butcher-basket-born Kirke White!

  That most gifted youth, Henry Kirke White, whose sincere and ardent piety was equaled only by his genius, his learning, and his uncommon ardor in the pursuit of knowledge.

General

  He seldom discovered any sportiveness of imagination, though he would very ably and pleasantly rally any one of his friends for any little peculiarity; his conversation was always sober and to the purpose. That which is the most remarkable in him, is his uniform good sense, a faculty perhaps less common than genius. There never existed a more dutiful son, a more affectionate brother, a warmer friend, nor a devouter Christian. Of his powers of mind it is superfluous to speak; they were acknowledged wherever they were known. It would be idle too to say what hopes were entertained for him, and what he might have accomplished in literature.

  There are, I think, among these “Remains,” a few of the most exquisite pieces in the whole body of English poetry. Conjoined with an easy and flowing fancy, they possess the charm of a peculiar moral delicacy, often conveyed in a happy and inimitable simplicity of language.

  Setting aside his bigotry, he surely ranks next to Chatterton. It is astonishing how little he was known; and at Cambridge no one thought or heard of such a man till his death rendered all notice useless. For my own part, I should have been most proud of such an acquaintance: his very prejudices were respectable.

  To Chatterton … he is not to be compared. Chatterton has the force of a young poetical Titan, who threatens to take Parnassus by storm. White is a boy differing from others more in aptitude to follow than in ability to lead. The one is complete in every limb, active, self-confident, and restless from his own energy. The other, gentle, docile, and animated rather than vigorous. He began, as most youthful writers have begun, by copying those whom he saw to be the objects of popular applause in his own day. He has little distinct character of his own. We may trace him by turns to Goldsmith, Chatterton, and Coleridge.

  His talents were unusually precocious, and their variety was as astonishing as their extent. Besides the Poetical pieces in this volume, and his scholastic attainments, his ability was manifested in various other ways. His style was remarkable for its clearness and elegance, and his correspondence and prose pieces show extensive information. To great genius and capacity, he united the rarest and more important gifts of a sound judgment and common sense…. Kirke White’s poetry is popular because it describes feelings, passions, and associations, which all have felt, and with which all can sympathize. It is by no means rich in metaphor, nor does it evince great powers of imagination; but it is pathetic, plaintive, and agreeable; and emanating directly from his own heart, it appeals irresistibly to that of his reader.

  Few writers of verses have been more overrated than Henry Kirke White, and it is a shame, that while there has never appeared in this country a single edition of the poetical writings of Landor, Kenyon, Milnes, Miss Barrett, and others of similar merit, there have been more impressions of White than there have been of Milton, or Pope, or Coleridge…. He was scarcely equal to the Davidsons of New York, and it would be almost as absurd to compare him with Keats or Chatterton as to compare Robert Montgomery with Milton. I doubt whether if he had lived to the maturest age, he would have produced any thing in poetry above elegant mediocrity.

  Kirke White’s promises were endorsed by the respectable name of Mr. Southey, but surely with no authority from Apollo. They have the merit of a traditional piety, which, to our mind, if uttered at all, had been less objectionable in the retired closet of a diary, and in the sober raiment of prose. They do not clutch hold of the memory with the drowning pertinacity of Watts; neither have they the interest of his occasional simple, lucky beauty.

  The torch of his inspiration was certainly kindled at the inner shrine; but it was darkly destined that his fair dawn was to have no meridian; and with a heart full of youthful promise, and of lofty aspirations—devoted to the noblest and purest objects of humanity—he died while his feet were yet on the threshold of manhood. Three, at least, of the great magnates of literature lamented his fate, and were loud in his praises. On examining his posthumous papers, Coleridge and Southey alike expressed their astonishment at so much genius united to so much industry; and Byron, in a truculent satire, wherein almost nobody was spared, truth-stricken, suspended the lash, to scatter flowers liberally on his early grave.

  In coming to the consideration of his works and genius, it is extremely difficult, so to speak, to insulate ourselves from all considerations connected with his lovely character, his brief laborious life, and his premature end. That he was a man of high talents, of powers of fancy and eloquence of a rare order, as well as indomitable energy, and great assimilative and acquisite capacity, must be conceded by all. But there are not a few who deny him the possession of original genius, and who even in the uniform good taste and good sense which he discovered at so early an age find an argument in favour of their hypothesis.

  A protégé of Simeon, who fell a victim to over study, whose memory Byron embalmed in some beautiful lines, whose death Southey deemed a loss to our literature—hymns, sonnets, and lyric pieces, written before he had reached his twentieth year, all distinguished by plaintive tenderness and pleasing fancy, though without the certain indications of great genius which we have in the equally early writings of Cowley or of Chatterton.

  He wrote a number of sonnets, nearly all of which were composed while he was a hopeless consumptive. With one or two exceptions, they are pitched in a plaintive minor key; and although they are too uniformly sad to be thoroughly enjoyable, they are so gracefully poetic, and there is so little of selfish or morbid repining in them, that their soft murmurs awaken pleasant emotions, even while they touch our sympathies and suffuse our eyes with tender sorrow.

  The lad, in every way lacking pith and substance, and ripening prematurely in a heated atmosphere, drooped and died.

  His splendid poem, the “Star of Bethlehem,” is destined to live in the memories and hearts of all lovers of sacred song.

  Both withdrew from a profession that was distasteful to them; both loved unhappily—the lady being, curiously enough, in each case named Fanny; both had the foreknowledge of their approaching death, and both suffered in consequence from a penetrating melancholy, amounting at times to a refined despair, the outcome of baffled hopes and thwarted ambition. Both died young. The trumpeter of their fame had his clarion already at his lips, but hurrying death stopped their ears, so that they did not hear the blast. It would seem as if their lives and memories had been handed on together, as if our knowledge of the one is not complete without a knowledge of the other. Keats seems to have taken up the thread of Kirke White’s inspiration, or to have woven it into the fabric of his own genius; he seems unconsciously to have become the sequel, the completion, the consummation of White. He did not so much eclipse, as pass into, comprehend, and, as it were re-issue him. Much of Keats’s verse seems an echo, a remembrance of Henry’s, but a remembrance that is given with a more satisfying expression, a more artistic utterance…. White, like Keats, is peculiarly the child of this century, though he died on its very threshold. There is in both cases the same self-destroying heart—and brain-consuming “passion for the unattainable.” Henry possessed the genuine fin-de-sièle temperament, without being in any sense a sickly, sentimental, self-absorbed nineteenth century poseur. Like Tasso, he battled with his agony. His pain struck music from him; and until death seized him, his brave, high-minded courage enabled him to conceal the “torture of his despair.” Nearly a hundred years have passed since he died, and while the name of Keats is upon many lips, the world only occasionally hears of Henry. But his genius cannot perish, and from time to time there will be breathed upon the air an echo of what he himself calls his “faint, neglected song.”

  Any one who will now study Kirke White’s poems in themselves, as literature, without prejudice, must inevitably come to the conclusion that they are worthless, and disfigured by every fault that can be laid to the charge of poetry. They are not even promising. They are tedious, grotesque, inharmonious, dull. And yet they have a place in the Aldine edition of British poets.

  He was a poetaster, and nothing more. The “genius” attributed to him in Byron’s well-known and noble though rather rhetorical lines may be discovered on an average in about half a dozen poets during any two or three years of any tolerable poetic period. His best things are imitations of Cowper in his sacred mood, such as the familiar “Star of Bethlehem,” and even these are generally spoilt by some feebleness or false note. At his worst he is not far from Della Crusca.

  “Oft in Sorrow, Oft in Woe.”—Kirke White’s marching song of the Christian Life has no such lilting tune attached to it as “Onward Christian Soldiers,” but being older it has probably helped more souls than its recent rival.

  Few men have owed more in the way of reputation to their misfortunes than Kirke White. His continual struggles against adverse circumstances in the pursuit of knowledge, together with the amiability of his disposition and the piety of his life, secured for him many friends, who, in their admiration for his character, discovered evidence of Genius in his verse which those uninfluenced by his personality are unable to detect. It would of course be absurd to look for maturity in the work of a youth of twenty years, but Genius could scarcely have written as much as this youth wrote without betraying itself, however crudely, in some thought or phrase of obvious originality or latent power. Kirk White’s poems display no such evidence as we expect to find in the work of Genius, however young. He lacked originality and imagination; and while unable to invent new forms of beauty, showed no freshness in his views of old forms of truth. He had ambition, but he had nothing to say, nor was there anything felicitous in his manner of saying nothing. Among the “Fragments,” gathered from the backs of old mathematical papers, there are one or two which are calculated to excite expectation, but it may be doubted whether he would ever have justified the claims made on his behalf even if Time had dealt more gently with him…. Of Kirk White’s shorter poems his lines “To Love” have been perhaps most frequently quoted, though they can scarcely be said to rise above the level of valentine verse.

  Southey’s charitable judgment, which Byron echoed, has not stood the test of time. White’s verse shows every mark of immaturity. In thought and expression it lacks vigour and originality. A promise of weirdness in an early and prophetic lyric, “A Dance of Consumptives” (from an unfinished “Eccentric Drama”) was not fulfilled in his later compositions. The metrical dexterity which is shown in the addition to Waller’s “Go, lovely Rose,” is not beyond a mediocre capacity. Such popularity as White’s work has enjoyed is to be attributed to the pathetic brevity of his career and to the fervour of the evangelical piety which inspired the greater part of his writings in both verse and prose.