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Home  »  The Sacred Poets of the Nineteenth Century  »  Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897)

Alfred H. Miles, ed. The Sacred Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.

By Critical and Biographical Essay by Alfred H. Miles

Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897)

IN Vol. V. of The Poets and the Poetry of the Century a selection of the general poetry of Mr. Francis Turner Palgrave is given, with a prefatory notice by Mr. H. J. Gibbs. The general selection there presented is here supplemented by examples of Mr. Palgrave’s religious verse, to which a few bibliographical and other particulars may be added.

The eldest son of Sir Francis Turner Palgrave, the historian, the subject of this sketch, was born at Great Yarmouth on the 28th of September, 1824, and was educated at the Charterhouse School and Balliol College, Oxford. He graduated in 1847, taking a first in Classics, and was elected to a fellowship at Exeter College. In 1885 he succeeded Professor Shairp in the Chair of Poetry at Oxford. He was Vice-Principal, under Dr. Temple (afterwards Bishop of London and later Archbishop of Canterbury), of Kneller Hall Training College for Schoolmasters from 1850 to 1855, and afterwards successively Secretary to Lord Granville and Assistant Secretary to the Committee of the Privy Council on Education.

Mr. Palgrave published “Idyls and Songs” (1854); “Hymns” (1867); “Lyrical Dreams” (1871); “A Lyric Garland” (1874); “The Vision of England” (1881); “Amenophis and other Poems” (1892). Besides these original works Mr. Palgrave has also edited the “Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, with a Memoir” (1862); “The Golden Treasury” (1864); “Shakespeare’s Songs and Sonnets” (1865); “Scott’s Poems” (1866); “The Children’s Treasury of Lyrical Poetry” (1875); “Chrysomela: a Selection from the Poems of Herrick” (1877); “Keats” (1884), and “Wordsworth” (1885); besides a volume of original “Essays on Art” (1866); and two stories, “Preciosa” (1852), and “Five Days’ Entertainment at Wentworth Grange” (1868).

The following selections are taken from the volume “Amenophis and other Poems, Sacred and Secular” (1892), a volume which contains a number of pieces “printed (with revision) from the series published in 1870,” together with others which “appeared dispersedly.” Francis Turner Palgrave died on the 24th of October, 1897.