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Show SWINBURNE CLOSE TO DEATH Great English Poet Thought of Unfinished Un-finished Work When He Was About Drowned. The poet's emotions In the face of death ought not to be unworthy of record when that poet happens to be one of the greatest of his time, if not of all time. Swinburne nearly lost his life in the summer of 1868 while bathing. The timely appearance of a fishing smack prevented the premature silencing silenc-ing of the voice that waB presently to entrance the world with the "Songs Before Sunrise." I asked him what he thought about in that dreadful contingency, and he replied that he had no experience of what people often profess to witness, the concentrated panorama of past life hurrying across the memory. He did not reflect on the past at all. He was filled with annoyance that he had not finished his "Songs Before Sunrise," Sun-rise," and then with satisfaction that so much of it was ready for the press, and that Mazzini would be pleased with him. "I reflected with resignation that I was exactly the same age as Shelley was when he was drowned," he said. This, however, was not the case. Swinburne had reached that age In March, 1867; but this was part of a curious delusion of Swinburne's that he was younger by two or three years than his real age. Then he began to be, I suppose, a little benumbed by the water, his thoughts fixed on the clothes he had left on the beach, and he worried his clouded brain about some unfinished verses in the pocket of his coat. Edmund Ed-mund Gosse, In Cornhill Magazine. |