Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/230

 Immediately after graduating in 1864, he took a four months' tour on the continent, visiting Italy, Greece, Smyrna and the islands, and Constantinople; and in the next summer he spent a large portion of the long vacation in Canada and the United States. In the course of this visit he swam across the river below the Niagara Falls, being, it is believed, the first Englishman to perform this dangerous feat. In the October term of 1865 he was appointed classical lecturer in Trinity College, Cambridge, and held the office for four years; but his bent was not for teaching, and he resigned the lectureship in 1809. Two years later he accepted a temporary appointment under the education department, and in 1872 he was placed on the permanent staff of school inspectors, a post which he held until within a few weeks of his death.

He was married on 13 March 1880, by Dean Stanley (an old friend of his father's), in Henry VII's chapel, Westminster Abbey, to Eveleen, youngest daughter of Charles Tennant of Cadoxton Lodge, Neath. In 1881 he and his wife took up their abode in Cambridge, which was their home from that time forward.

Apart from his official duties and the circle of his family and friends, the chief interests of a life that was outwardly uneventful were centred round two things—first, his literary work; and, secondly, the systematic investigation into mesmerism, clairvoyance, automatism, and other abnormal phenomena, real or alleged.

His work in poetry was intermittent, and was practically confined, as far as the published pieces are concerned, to the fifteen years between 1867 and 1882. Many of these poems appeared first in magazines, and were afterwards collected and reissued with additions. The first to appear was the poem entitled 'St. Paul' (London, 1867, 8vo). This was composed for the Seatonian prize, an English verse competition at Cambridge, confined to graduates; but it failed to obtain the prize, possibly because it did not conform to the traditional requirements, though of all Myers's poems it is perhaps the most widely known. In 1870 appeared a small volume of collected pieces, which in a few years was exhausted, and which the author never reprinted as a whole. But he continued to write occasional pieces, which were published in magazines; and in 1882 a new collection was issued, which was entitled, from the latest written and most important poem, 'The Renewal of Youth.' This poem, containing many passages of striking beauty, was a sort of palinode to 'The Passing of Youth,' written from another point of view eleven years earlier, and included in the 1882 volume. There were also a few poems from the 1870 collection, as well as various shorter pieces written in the intervening twelve years. This book and 'St. Paul,' now published separately, represent for the public the author's work in poetry. That he ceased for the remaining eighteen years of his life to seek expression for his thoughts and feelings in verse, except on the rarest occasions, could not be ascribed by any one who knew him either to a loss of interest or to the least decay of power. The true reason was no doubt the growing absorption of his leisure, during the last twenty years of his life, in the work of psychical research.

His poetic work was known at first to comparatively few, but of late years has had a steadily increasing public; and the compressed force, the ardent feeling, the vivid and finished expression, and, above all, the combined imaginativeness and sincerity of his best work (particularly his latest poem, 'The Renewal of Youth'), could leave few qualified readers in doubt of the genuineness of his poetic gift.

His prose papers were written at various times previous to 1883, when they were collected in two volumes, with the title 'Essays, Classical and Modern,' which have been twice reprinted, in 1888 and 1897. They fall naturally into two groups, according as they are concerned with poetry (as in the essays on Virgil, Rossetti, Victor Hugo, and Trench), or touch on the questions of religious thought, or on the psychological, moral, and spiritual subjects and problems which tended more and more to occupy his mind. The latter emerge in, or underlie, the papers on Mazzini, Renan, and George Eliot, on Marcus Aurelius, and on Greek Oracles. Of the first group the most remarkable is undoubtedly the paper (which first appeared in 1879 in the 'Fortnightly Review') on Virgil, the poet who above all others had been the object of his reverence and enthusiasm from early boyhood, and whom he later describes as 'one of the supports of his life.'

Myers's monograph on Wordsworth was published in 1881 in the series of 'English Men of Leters [sic];' and after all that men of genius have written about Wordsworth, from Ruskin and Matthew Arnold downwards, there are not a few readers who owe a special debt to the penetrating and illuminating criticism of this little volume. Mr. John Morley justly describes Myers's work as ' distinguished as much by insight as by admirable literary grace and power.' The same insight and skill appear in the brief