Only son of Dr. Westland Marston, and godson of Dinah Maria Mulock (Mrs. Craik). It was to him she addressed her poem “Philip, My King.” Notwithstanding his blindness caused by an injury to his eyes when he was a young child, he began to dictate verses from his early youth. The loss through death of his betrothed (Miss Nesbit), his two sisters, his brother-in-law, Arthur O’Shaughnessy, and his friend, Oliver Madox Brown, all occurred within the space of a few years. Rossetti encouraged his genius, and said of some of his verse that it was “worthy of Shakespeare in his subtlest lyrical moods.” “Song-Tide and Other Poems” was issued in 1871, and was followed by “All in All” in 1875, and “Wind Voices,” 1883. A collection of all his poems was edited with a memoir by his devoted friend, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, in 1892.

Personal

  I, myself, first met him in 1876, on the first day of July—just six weeks before his twenty-sixth birthday. He was tall, slight, and in spite of his blindness, graceful. He seemed to me young-looking even for his twenty-six years. He had a noble and beautiful forehead. His brown eyes were perfect in shape, and even in colour, save for a dimness like a white mist that obscured the pupil, but which you perceived only when you were quite near to him. His hair and beard were dark brown, with warm glints of chestnut; and the colour came and went in his cheeks as in those of a sensitive girl. His face was singularly refined, but his lips were full and pleasure-loving, and suggested dumbly how cruel must be the limitations of blindness to a nature hungry for love and for beauty. I had been greatly interested, before seeing him, in his poems, and to meet him was a memorable delight.

General

  Philip Bourke Marston’s verse is chiefly of a subjective nature, the outcome of his own emotions and experiences. He, too, resides in London, where he was born in 1850. To few poets so young have the extreme tests of life been applied more directly; he has borne the loss of his nearest and dearest, and is debarred from the sweet comfort of the light of day, in which the artist soul finds most relief. But no poet ever received more sympathy and care from those attached to him…. Mr. Marston has the poetic temperament, with extreme impressibility of feeling, and the imagination and wonderful memory often noted in the blind. These traits are seen in his poetry, of which the sentiment and insight are genuine, and they affect his essays and tales.

  Mr. Marston’s chief drawback—from the point of view of the general reader—is monotony of theme, though in his latest volume he has done much to obviate this objection. This, and his undoubted over-shadowing by the genius of the greatest sonnet-writer of our day, are probably the reasons for his comparatively restricted reputation. Curiously enough, Mr. Marston is much better known and more widely read in America than here; indeed he is undoubtedly the most popular of all our younger men oversea. Throughout all his poetry—for the most part very beautiful—there is exquisite sensitiveness to the delicate hues and gradations of colour in sky and on earth, all the more noteworthy from the fact of the author’s misfortune of blindness.

  The world will not let his work die out of remembrance, or cease to be grateful for the rich gifts his too short life bequeathed.