A BELT OF ASTEROIDS
Sexagenarians can remember the notoriety given Herbert Knowles—an English youth who died at Canterbury in his twentieth year—by Robert Southey, who set him forth in the London Quarterly as a second Kirke White. Knowles was a precocious religious poet, and his surviving verses are "Lines Written in the Churchyard of Richmond," to the text, Matt, xvii., 4:
Methinks it is good to be here!
If thou wilt, let us build, but to whom?
These will appear in many future compilations; and so will the thoughtful numbers of our own countrywoman, Harriet Winslow:
Why thus longing, thus forever sighing
For the far-off, unattained and dim?
But a more impassioned and elevated single poem is that fervent composition imagined to have been written by "Milton on his Blindness"—the work of a Quaker lady, Elizabeth Lloyd,[1] of Philadelphia. These truly "noble numbers" deserve the attention which they gained upon their first appearance, at which time paragraphists went so far as to call them Milton's own, and credit them to an Oxford edition of his poems. They are not Miltonic in the least, but exhibit a rapturous inspiration, and of themselves have insured their writer a long regard.
- ↑ Now Mrs. E. L. Howell.
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