Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 February 1913 — SWINBURNE CLOSE TO DEATH [ARTICLE]

SWINBURNE CLOSE TO DEATH

Great English Poet Thought of Unfinished Work When He Was About Drowned. Tae 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 of the voice that was 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,” and then with satisfaction that so much of it was ready for the press, and that Mazxini would be pleased with him. “I reflected with resignation that I was exactly the Bame age as Shelley was when he was drowned,” he said. This, however, was not the case. Swinburne had reached that age in March, 18$7; 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 Gosße, in Cornhill Magazine. Great Painter's Last Days Pathetic. The philosopher may ruminate profitably over the fact that a picture by Degas has just been sold in Paris for $85,000, while Degas himself, old and nearly blind, is living in misery in a fifth-floor attic practically without furniture. Degas is eighty-four years old and without resources. A correspondent of the London Express visited his room and found him out He had gone to the sale of his picture, from curiosity, for he had no interest in it When he came in he said: ‘‘Yes, I went to the Bale. The figure was a high one. I heard people talk of the life in the dancers on my canvas. For me all the canvases, all the faces, all the eyes around me were dancing. I was a painter, was I not? I am nothing but a blind old' man now.” Perhaps there was something in Whistler’s contention that a painter should always have some proprietary rights over his creations. At least the idea contains a sentiment that should be respected, a sentiment, let us hope, not altogether without its appeal to the man who had just received $85,000 for the work of an artist who actually lacked bread to eat.