singing the praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar.” But under his excellent good-fellowship lurked a haunting melancholy. Full of ardour and ambition, sympathy and desire, he was perpetually tormented by the riddles of existence; through life he was always a seeker, ardent but unsatisfied. This side of his nature stands revealed in his gnomic poetry, and particularly in the sonnets of his Animi Figura (1882), where he has portrayed his own character with great subtlety. His poetry is perhaps rather that of the student than of the inspired singer, hut it has moments of deep thought and emotion. It is, indeed, in passages and extracts that Symonds appears at his best. Rich in description, full of “purple patches,” his work has not that harmony and unity that are essential to the conduct of philosophical argument. He saw the part more clearly than the whole; but his view, if partial, is always vivid and concentrated. His translations are among the finest in the language; here his subject was found for him, and he was able to lavish on it the wealth of colour and quick sympathy which were his characteristics. He was a lover of beauty, a poet and a philosopher; but in his life and his work alike he missed that absolute harmony of conviction and concentration under which alone the highest kind of literature is produced. (A. Wa.)
SYMONDS, WILLIAM SAMUEL (1818–1887), was born in Hereford in 1818. He was educated at Cheltenham and Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1842. Having taken holy orders he was appointed curate of Offenham, near Evesham in 1843, and two years later he was presented to the living of Pendock in Worcestershire, where he remained until 1877. While at Offenham he became acquainted with H. E. Strickland and imbibed from him such an interest in natural history and geology, that his leisure was henceforth devoted to these subjects. He was one of the founders of the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club (1851) and of the Malvern Naturalists' Field Club (1853), and was an active member of the Cotteswold Field Club and other local societies. In 1858 he edited an edition of Hugh Miller’s Cruise of the “Betsey.” He was the author of numerous essays on the geology of the Malvern country, notably of a paper “On the passage-beds from the Upper Silurian rocks into the Lower Old Red Sandstone at Ledbury” (Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. 1860). His principal work was Records of the Rocks (1872). He was author of Stones of the Valley (1857), Old Bones, or Notes for Young Naturalists (1859, 2nd ed. 1864), and other popular works. He died at Cheltenham on the 15th of September 1887.
See A Sketch of the Life of the Rev. W. S. Symonds, by the Rev. J. D. La Touche.
SYMOND’S YAT, one of the most famous view points on the river Wye, England. At a point 9 m. above Monmouth and 12 m. below Ross by water, the Wye makes a sweep of nearly 5 m. round a peninsula whose neck is only some 600 yds. across. The peninsula is occupied by the limestone acclivity of Huntsham Hill. Caverns are seen in the limestone on both precipitous banks of the river. The Yat or Gate is situated on the west side of the neck, which reaches an elevation over 500 ft., and a road from the east drops to a ferry, which was of early importance as a highway between England and Wales. The boundary between Herefordshire and Gloucestershire crosses the neck; the Yat is in the county first named, but the railway station, on the east side (left bank) is in Gloucestershire. It is on the Ross-Monmouth line of the Great Western railway. There are here groups of cottages and several inns on both
banks, while opposite the Yat itself is the hamlet of New Weir, and a little above it the village of Whitchurch. The river banks are densely wooded, except where they become sheer cliffs, as at the Coldwell rocks above the station. The surrounding country is hilly and rich, and the views from the Yat are superb, embracing the Forest of Dean to the south and east, and backed by the mountains of the Welsh border in the west.
SYMONS, ARTHUR (1865–), English poet and critic, was born in Wales on the 28th of February 1865, of Cornish parents. He was educated privately, spending much of his time in France and Italy. In 1884–1886 he edited four of Quaritch’s Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles, and in 1888–1889 seven plays of the “Henry Irving” Shakespeare. He became a member of the staff of the Athenaeum in 1891, and of the Saturday Review in 1894. His first volume of verse, Days and Nights (1889), consisted of dramatic monologues. His later verse is influenced by a close study of modern French writers, of Baudelaire and especially of Verlaine. He reflects French tendencies both in the subject-matter and style of his poems, in their eroticism and their vividness of description. His volumes of verse are: Silhouettes (1892), London Nights (1895), Amoris victima (1897), Images of Good and Evil (1899), A Book of Twenty Songs (1905). In 1902 he made a selection from his earlier verse, published as Poems (2 vols.). He translated from the Italian of Gabriele d'Annunzio The Dead City (1900) and The Child of Pleasure (1898), and from the French of Emile Verhaeren The Dawn (1898). To The Poems of Ernest Dowson (1905) he prefixed an essay on the deceased poet, who was a kind of English Verlaine and had many attractions for Mr Symons. Among his volumes of collected essays are: Studies in Two Literatures (1897), The Symbolist School in Literature (1899), Cities (1903), word-pictures of Rome, Venice, Naples, Seville, &c., Plays, Acting and Music (1903), Studies in Prose and Verse (1904), Spiritual Adventures (1905), Studies in Seven Arts (1906).
SYMONS, GEORGE JAMES (1838–1900), English meteorologist, was born in Pimlico, London, on the 6th of August 1838. In 1860 he obtained a post in the meteorological department of the Board of Trade under Admiral Robert Fitzroy, who was then deeply interested in the subject of storm-warnings, and in the same year he published the first annual volume of British Rainfall, which contained records from 168 stations in England and Wales, but none from Scotland or Ireland. Three years later he resigned his appointment at the Board of Trade, where his rainfall inquiries were not appreciated—at least not as a prior study of storm-warnings—and devoted his whole energies to the organization of a band of volunteer observers for the collection of particulars of rainfall throughout the British Isles. So successful was he in this object that by 1866 he was able to show results which gave a fair representation of the distribution of rainfall, and the number of recorders gradually increased until the last volume of British Rainfall which he lived to edit (that for 1899) contained figures from 3528 stations—2894 in England and Wales, 446 in Scotland, and 188 in Ireland. Apart from their scientific interest, these annual reports are of great practical importance, since they afford engineers and others engaged in water supply much-needed data for their calculations, the former absence of which had on some occasions given rise to grave mistakes. Symons himself devoted special study not only to rainfall, but also to the evaporation and percolation of water as affecting underground streams, and his extensive knowledge rendered him a valuable witness before parliamentary committees. In other branches of meteorology also he took a keen interest, and he was particularly indefatigable, though consistently unsuccessful, in the quest of a genuine thunderbolt. The history of the science too attracted his attention, and he possessed a fine library of meteorological works, which passed to the Meteorological Society at his death. Of that society he became a member when only eighteen, and he retained his connexion with it in various official capacities up to the end of his life. He served as its president in 1880, and in view of the celebration of its jubilee was re-elected to that office in 1900, but the illness that caused his death prevented him from acting. He died in London on the 10th of March 1900.
SYMPATHETIC SYSTEM, in physiology. By the “sympathetic system ” is understood a set of nerves and ganglia more or less sharply marked off from the cerebro-spinal, both functionally and anatomically. (For anatomy see Nervous System.) Formerly it was thought more independent from the rest of the general nervous system than recent discoveries have found it actually to be. It used to be supposed that the ganglia of the sympathetic system 'were analogous in function to the
