(William Sharp)

William Sharp was born at Garthland Place, Scotland, in 1855. He wrote several volumes of biography and criticism, published a book of plays greatly influenced by Maeterlinck (Vistas) and was editor of "The Canterbury Poets" series.

His feminine alter ego, Fiona Macleod, was a far different personality. Sharp actually believed himself possessed of another spirit; under the spell of this other self, he wrote several volumes of Celtic tales, beautiful tragic romances and no little unusual poetry. Of the prose stories written by Fiona Macleod, the most barbaric and vivid are those collected in The Sin-Eater and Other Tales; the longer Pharais, A Romance of the Isles, is scarcely less unique.

In the ten years, 1882-1891, William Sharp published four volumes of rather undistinguished verse. In 1896 From the Hills of Dream appeared over the signature of Fiona Macleod; The Hour of Beauty, an even more distinctive collection, followed shortly. Both poetry and prose were always the result of two sharply differentiated moods constantly fluctuating; the emotional mood was that of Fiona Macleod, the intellectual and, it must be admitted the more arresting, was that of William Sharp.

He died in 1905.

THE VALLEY OF SILENCE

In the secret Valley of Silence
No breath doth fall;

No wind stirs in the branches;
No bird doth call:

As on a white wall

A breathless lizard is still,
So silence lies on the valley
Breathlessly still.

In the dusk-grown heart of the valley

An altar rises white:

No rapt priest bends in awe
Before its silent light:

But sometimes a flight

Of breathless words of prayer
White-wing'd enclose the altar,
Eddies of prayer.

THE VISION

In a fair place

Of whin and grass,

I heard feet pass

Where no one was.

I saw a face

Bloom like a flower

Nay, as the rainbow-shower
Of a tempestuous hour.

It was not man, or woman:
It was not human:

But, beautiful and wild,
Terribly undefiled,

I knew an unborn child.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was born at Dublin, Ireland, in 1856, and even as an undergraduate at Oxford he was marked for a brilliant career. When he was a trifle over 21 years of age, he won the Newdigate Prize with his poem Ravenna.

Giving himself almost entirely to prose, he speedily became known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even more brilliant paradoxical plays such as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. His aphorisms and flippancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was only surpassed by his notoriety as an æsthete. (See Preface.)

Most of his poems in prose (such as The Happy Prince, The Birthday of the Infanta and The Fisherman and His Soul) are more imaginative and richly colored than his verse; but in one long poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), he sounded his deepest, simplest and most enduring note. Prison was, in many ways, a regeneration for Wilde. It not only produced The Ballad of Reading Gaol but made possible his most poignant piece of writing, De Profundis, only a small part of which has been published. Salomé, which has made the author's name a household word, was originally written in French in 1892 and later translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas, accompanied by the famous illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. More recently this heated drama, based on the story of Herod and Herodias, was made into an opera by Richard Strauss.

Wilde's society plays, flashing and cynical, were the forerunners of Bernard Shaw's audacious and far more searching ironies. One sees the origin of a whole school of drama in such epigrams as "The history of woman is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known: the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts." Or "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

Wilde died at Paris, November 30, 1900.

REQUIESCAT

Tread lightly, she is near

Under the snow,

Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.

All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,

She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew

She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,

Lie on her breast;

I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.

Peace, peace; she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet;

All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.

IMPRESSION DU MATIN

The Thames nocturne of blue and gold
Changed to a harmony in grey;

A barge with ochre-coloured hay
Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold

The yellow fog came creeping down
The bridges, till the houses' walls

Seemed changed to shadows, and St. Paul's Loomed like a bubble o'er the town.

Then suddenly arose the clang

Of waking life; the streets were stirred
With country waggons; and a bird
Flew to the glistening roofs and sang.

But one pale woman all alone,

The daylight kissing her wan hair,
Loitered beneath the gas lamps' flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone.

John Davidson

John Davidson was born at Barrhead, Renfrewshire, in 1857. His Ballads and Songs (1895) and New Ballads (1897) attained a sudden but too short-lived popularity, and his great promise was quenched by an apathetic public and by his own growing disillusion and despair. His sombre yet direct poetry never tired of repeating his favorite theme: "Man is but the Universe grown conscious."

Davidson died by his own hand in 1909.

A BALLAD OF HELL

'A letter from my love to-day!
Oh, unexpected, dear appeal!'

She struck a happy tear away,
And broke the crimson seal.

'My love, there is no help on earth,

No help in heaven; the dead-man's bell
Must toll our wedding; our first hearth.
Must be the well-paved floor of hell.'