Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/308

 on his pen for a livelihood, he often ran risk of starvation. At the end of 1882 Sharp wrote a short life of Rossetti (who died in April 1882). In 1882, too, appeared a volume of poems, ’The Human Inheritance,' which obtained some recognition and led to an invitation from the editor of ’Harper's Magazine' for other poems, which brought him 40l. A cheque for 200l. sent him by an unknown friend enabled him to study art in Italy for five months (1883–4). He contributed a series of articles on Etruscan cities to the 'Glasgow Herald,' and was appointed art critic to the paper. In 1884 he married his cousin and published a second volume of verse, 'Earth's Voices,' vividly impressionist, but somewhat diffuse. In 1884 he became editor of the 'Canterbury Poets,' contributing himself editions of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1885), English Sonnets (1886), American Sonnets (1889), and Great Odes (1890). For a series of 'Biographies of Great Writers' he wrote on Shelley (1887), Heine (1888), and Browning (1890). He also published 'The Sport of Chance' (1888), a sensational story, for the 'People's Friend'; contributed boys' stories to 'Young Folks,' which he edited in 1887; and published 'Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy' (1888; 2nd edit. 1889), fluently fanciful but lacking in finish, and 'The Children of To-morrow' (1889), a romantic tale, in which he voiced his impatience of conventionality.

A visit in the autumn of 1889 to the United States and Canada reawakened his desire to wander. After a stay of some months in the summer of 1890 in Scotland and a torn: through Germany, he went in the late autumn to Rome, where he wrote a series of impressionist unrhymed poems in irregular metre, 'Sospiri di Roma,' printed for private circulation in 1891. In the spring of that year he left Italy for Provence on the way to London, where he completed the 'life and Letters of Joseph Severn' (published in 1892). Subsequently at Stuttgart he collaborated with the American novelist, Blanche Willis Howard, in a novel, 'A Fellowe and his Wife' (published in 1892). In the winter of 1891–2 he was again in America, when through an introduction from his friend, the American poet, E. C. Stedman, he had an interview with Walt Whitman. He also arranged for the publication in America of his 'Romantic Ballads' and 'Sospiri di Roma' in one volume, under the title 'Flower o' the Vine' (New York, 1892). The spring of 1892 was spent in Paris and the summer in London; and in the autumn he rented Phenice Croft, a cottage in Sussex, where, probably under the impulse of the Whitman visit and in a fit of irresponsible high spirits, he projected the ’Pagan Review,' edited by himself as W. H. Brooks and wholly written by himself under various pseudonyms. Only one number appeared; and, owing to his wife's unsatisfactory health, he set himself to the completion of two stories for 'Young Folks,' in order to obtain money to spend the winter in North Africa. Returning to England in the spring of 1893, he, while busy with articles and stories for the magazines, prepared a series of dramatic interludes, entitled 'Vistas' — 'vistas of the inner life of the human soul, psychic episodes' (published 1894). At Rome in 1890 he began a friendship with a lady who, 'because of her beauty, her strong sense of fife and of the joy of ’life,' stood as 'symbol of the heroic women of Greek and Celtic days,. . . unlocked new doors 'within him, and put him ' in touch with ancestral memories' (Life, p. 223). Sharp thenceforth devoted himself to a new land of literary work, penning much mystical prose and verse under the pseudonym of 'Fiona Macleod,' whose identity with himself he carefully concealed. Although in this phase of his literary production there was no collaboration with the lady of his idealism, he yet believed 'that without her there would have been no Fiona Macleod.' Much of the 'Fiona' literature was written under the influence of a kind of mesmeric or spiritual trance, or was the record of such trances.

The first of the books which Sharp wrote under the pseudonym of 'Fiona Macleod' was begun at Phenice Croft in 1893. It appeared in 1894 as 'Pharais: a Romance of the Isles,' and Sharp declared it to have been written 'with the pen dipped in the very ichor of my life.' The 'Fiona' series was continued in 1895 in ' The Mountain Lovers,' 'more elemental still' (1895), and ’The Sin Eater,' consisting of Celtic tales and myths 'recaptured in dreams ' (1896). The latter volume was published by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, a firm established in Edinburgh by Professor Geddes, with Sharp as literary adviser, for the publication of Celtic literature and works on science. There quickly succeeded 'The Washer of the Ford' (1896), a collection of tales and legendary moralities; 'Green Fire,' a Breton romance (1896), a portion of which, entitled 'The Herdsman,' was included in the 'Dominion of Dreams' (1899; revised American edit.