GENIUS AND LONGEVITY.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1275, 9 December 1884, Page 3

GENIUS AND LONGEVITY.

The European Mail remarks ; —Did nol Lord Koseberry go too far, in inaugurating the Burns statue the other day, when he said that “ genius, as a rule, made quick work with life ?” Of the world’s greatest poets, for instance, how many have died young 1 Burns and Byron and Keats and Shelley and Schiller are all cases in point ; but as a rule we do not find that they crowded a lifetime into a few brief years and then hurried off from an uncongenial sphere. iEschylus was sixty-nine years old when he died, Euripides seventy-three, and Sophocles eighty-nine. Virgil survived his half century by one year, and Horace, though also born in a short-lived age, died at fifty-seven. Dante did not die in spite of his troubles till he was fifty-six, and Shakespeare at his death was fifty-two years old. Of the other names which occur to us, Chaucer lived till he was seventy-two, Milton sixty-six, Voltaire died ateighty-fonr, Calderon at eighty-six, Goethe at eighty-three, and Wordsworth at eighty. No doubt many to whom the gods give genius die as young es those whom the gods love ; butin the face of this array of greybearded genius, Lord Roaebeny’s rule was much too absolute.