Richard Henry Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, September 24, 1789. His father, a merchant, emigrated to Baltimore, Md., in 1797, and died bankrupt in 1802. His widow removed to Augusta, Ga., where she kept a small shop and educated her family. Richard was admitted to the bar in 1809, became Attorney-General of Georgia, and in 1815 was elected to Congress. He was in Congress again from 1828 to 1835, and then went to Europe, and passed nearly five years in Italy. In Florence he found documents which threw new light upon the life of Dante, and discovered Giotto’s portrait of him on the wall of the Chapel of the Bargello. On his return home, Mr. Wilde published, in 1842, “Conjectures and Researches concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso,” with translations of several of Tasso’s poems. He also wrote the first volume of a projected life of Dante. In 1844 he removed to New Orleans, where he practised his profession, and occupied the chair of Common Law in the University of Louisiana till his death, which took place, September 10, 1847.

General

  Has acquired much reputation as a poet, and especially as the author of a little piece entitled “My Life is Like the Summer Rose,” whose claim to originality has been made the subject of repeated and reiterated attack and defence. Upon the whole it is hardly worth quarrelling about. Far better verses are to be found in every second newspaper we take up.

  The romantic love, the madness, and imprisonment of Tasso had become a subject of curious controversy, and he entered into the investigation “with the enthusiasm of a poet, and the patience and accuracy of a case-hunter,” and produced a work, published since his return to the United States, in which the questions concerning Tasso are most ably discussed, and lights are thrown upon them by his letters, and by some of his sonnets, which last are rendered into English with rare felicity.

  Besides his investigation in the literature of Dante he made a special study of the vexed question connected with the life of Tasso. The result of this he gave to the public on his return to America in his “Conjectures and Researches concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso,” a work of diligent scholarship, in which the elaborate argument is enlivened by the elegance of the frequent original translations of the sonnets. In this he maintains the sanity of Tasso, and traces the progress of the intrigue with the Princess Lenora D’Este as the key of the poet’s difficulties.

  I know, however, in the whole range of imitative verse, no line superior, perhaps I should say none equal, to that in Wilde’s celebrated nameless poem.

	Yet as if grieving to efface
	All vestige of the human race,
	On that lone shore loud moans the sea.

Here the employment of monosyllables, of long vowels and of liquids, without harsh consonantal sounds, together with the significance of the words themselves, gives to the verse a force of expression seldom if ever surpassed.

  Mr Wilde was [one day] surprised to find in a Georgia newspaper a Greek Ode, purporting to have been written by Alcæus, an early Eolian poet of somewhat obscure fame, and it was claimed that Mr. Wilde’s verses were simply a translation of this Ode, the ideas in both being almost identical. As Mr. Wilde had never heard of Alcæus, he was much puzzled to account for this resemblance of the two poems. At the suggestion of a friend, the Greek Ode was sent to Mr. Binney for examination and criticism. He at once, much to the relief of Mr. Wilde, pronounced it a forgery, pointing out wherein its style differed from that of the classical Greek. It turned out afterwards that the Ode in question had been written by an Oxford scholar on a wager that no one in that University was sufficiently familiar with the style of the early Greek poets to detect the counterfeit. To carry out this scheme, he had translated Mr. Wilde’s verses into Greek.

  The stanzas beginning “My life is like the summer rose” have a curious history. Mr. Wilde had a brother James, an officer in the United States army, who, on his return from the Seminole war, told numerous entertaining stories of his adventures in Florida. This suggested to Richard the idea of a song supposed to be sung by a European held captive among the savages of the Florida coast; and these stanzas, which were intended as the beginning of a longer poem, were the result. Mr. Anthony Barclay, of Savannah, translated the poem into Greek, and afterward somebody started the story that Wilde had stolen it from the Greek of Alcæus. The Georgia Historical Society has published a little volume to set the matter right.

  These “Stanzas” were not the work of a “single-poem-writer,” for the author wrote other finished and beautiful short poems that have been undeservedly forgotten.