Like Gray, he wrote
little, but every line is of great merit.
_Henry Kirke White_, 1785-1806: the son of a butcher, this gifted youth
displayed, in his brief life, such devotion to study, and such powers of
mind, that his friends could not but predict a brilliant future for him,
had he lived. Nothing that he produced is of the highest order of poetic
merit, but everything was full of promise. Of a weak constitution, he
could not bear the rigorous study which he prescribed to himself, and
which hastened his death. With the kind assistance of Mr. Capel Lofft and
the poet Southey, he was enabled to leave the trade to which he had been
apprenticed and go to Cambridge. His poems have most of them a strongly
devotional cast. Among them are _Gondoline_, _Clifton Grove_, and the
_Christiad_, in the last of which, like the swan, he chants his own
death-song. His memory has been kept green by Southey's edition of his
_Remains_, and by the beautiful allusion of Byron to his genius and his
fate in _The English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_.
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