The Project Gutenberg EBook of The International Magazine, Volume 2, No.
3, February, 1851, by Various

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Title: The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851

Author: Various

Release Date: August 5, 2008 [EBook #26196]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE

Of Literature, Art, and Science.

Vol. II. NEW-YORK, FEBRUARY 1, 1851. No. III

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
to the end of the article.

THOMAS CHATTERTON.

[Illustration]

In the history of English literature there is no name that inspires a
profounder melancholy than that of the "marvellous boy" Chatterton, of
whom it must be said that in genius he surpassed any one who ever died
so young, and that in suffering he had larger experience than almost any
one who has lived to old age. Shelley says of him:

"'Mid others of less note came one frail form,
A phantom among men; companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm,
Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess,
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness,
Aclaeon-like, and now he fled astray,
With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts along that rugged way
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey."

And Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Southey, Scott, Kirke White,
Landor, Montgomery, and others, have laid immortal flowers upon his
tomb, to make the heart ache that we did not live in time to save the
"sleepless soul" from "perishing in his pride."

Of the genius of poor Chatterton, Campbell says, "I would rather lean to
the utmost enthusiasm of his admirers, than to the cold opinion of those
who are afraid of being blinded to the defects of the poems attributed
to Rowley, by the veil of obsolete phraseology