Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.
Alexander Smith Quotes
To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.
Similar Quotes
Cricket is the greatest game that the wit of man has yet devised.
- Sir Pelham WarnerAdvertising is selling Twinkies to adults.
- Donald R. VanceThe struggle of the male to learn to listen to and respect his own intuitive, inner prompt...
- Herb GoldbergEach generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the ...
- Francis SchaefferEach had defended his own country; the Germans Germany, the Frenchmen France; they had don...
- Ernst TollerComments on: "Alexander Smith Quotes: To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation."
| Birth: | 31st December, 1830 |
| Death: | 5th January, 1867 |
| Nationality: | Scottish |
| Profession: | Poet |
About
He was born in a thatched house in Kilmarnock, in the Scottish Lowlands south-west of Glasgow, the first of several children. His father, John Smith, was a Lowlander who worked as a designer of lace, calico prints, paisley patterns, and muslins. His mother Christina Murray Smith was of Highland extraction and, together with a Highland servant girl, first introduced him to Gaelic songs and Scottish legends.
Being too poor to send him to college, his parents placed him in a linen factory in Glasgow to follow his father's trade of a pattern designer. His early poems appeared in the Glasgow Citizen, in whose editor, James Hedderwick, he found a friend. A Life Drama and other Poems (1853) was a work of promise, ran through several editions, and gained Smith the appointment of secretary to Edinburgh University in 1854.
As a poet he was one of the leading representatives of what was called the "Spasmodic" School, now fallen into oblivion. Smith, P. J. Bailey and Sydney Dobell were satirized by W. E. Aytoun in 1854 in Firmilian: a Spasmodic Tragedy.In the same year Sydney Dobell came to Edinburgh, and an acquaintanceship at once sprang up between the two, which resulted in their collaboration in a book of War Sonnets (1855), inspired by the Crimean War. He also published City Poems (1857) and Edwin of Northumbria Edwin of Deira (1861), a Northumbrian epic poem. He wrote two novels, Miss Dona M'Quarrie (18??), and his last work Alfred Hagart's Household (1866) which ran first through Good Words.
He died in Wardie, near Edinburgh.
Share with your friends