your carriage."

"On no account," answered Madame Bourjot hastily: "I thank you. I
promised that I would sing for you, I think. I am going to sing."

And Madame Bourjot advanced to the piano, graceful and valiant, with the
heroic smile on her face wherewith the actors of society hide from the
public the tears that they shed within themselves, and the wounds which
are only known to their own hearts.

EDMUND GOSSE

(1849-)

Edmund William Gosse, or Edmund Gosse, to give him the name he has of
late years adopted, is a Londoner, the son of P.H. Gosse, an English
zoologist of repute. His education did not embrace the collegiate
training, but he was brought up amid cultured surroundings, read
largely, and when but eighteen was appointed an assistant librarian in
the British Museum, at the age of twenty-six receiving the position of
translator to the Board of Trade. Gosse is a good example of the
cultivated man of letters who fitted himself thoroughly for his
profession, though lacking the formal scholastic drill of the
university.

He began as a very young man to write for the leading English
periodicals, contributing papers and occasional poems to the Saturday
Review, Academy, and Cornhill Magazine, and soon gaining critical
recognition. In 1872 and 1874 he traveled in Scandinavia and Holland,
making literary studies which bore fruit in one of his best critical
works. He made his literary bow when twenty-one with the volume
'Madrigals, Songs, and Sonnets' (1870), which was well received, winning
praise from Tennyson. His essential qualities as a verse-writer appear
in it: elegance and care of workmanship, close study of nature, felicity
in phrasing, and a marked tendency to draw on literary culture for
subject and reference. Other works of poetry, 'On Viol and Flute'
(1873), 'New Poems' (1879), 'Firdausi in Exile' (1885), 'In Russet and
Gold' (1894), with the dramas 'King Erik' (1876) and 'The Unknown Lover'
(1878), show an increasingly firm technique and a broadening of outlook,
with some loss of the happy singing quality which characterized the
first volume. Gosse as a poet may be described as a lyrist with
attractive descriptive powers. Together with his fellow poets Lang and
Dobson, he revived in English verse the old French metrical forms, such
as the roundel, triolet, and ballade, and he has been very receptive to
the new in literary form and thought, while keeping a firm grip on the
classic models.