Cecil Frances Alexander, born Cecil Frances Humphreys on 14 April 1818 and dead on 12 October 1895, became one of the most widely sung and influential hymn writers of the nineteenth century. Her name may be less immediately familiar than the opening lines of her best-known hymns, yet “Once in Royal David’s City,” “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” and “Jesus Calls Us o’er the Tumult”…
“In some measure [may it] tend to make Sunday a pleasant day to children. May it help to teach them to praise God, the Father, Son, and Spirit; to contemplate life and death and their own hearts as Christians should”
Neighbourhood:
Children's Verse, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Irish Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Joy
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…
“Truly, I think that a little ‘Art for Art’ has already done a great deal of good in England, and that a little more is needed, and would be equally beneficial.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair