"We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once." -- Alexander Smith
Alexander Smith (31 December 1830- 5 January 1867, 8 January according to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable) was a Scottish poet, and labelled as one of the Spasmodic School.
"A great man is the man who does something for the first time.""A man doesn't plant a tree for himself. He plants it for posterity.""A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.""A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.""Books are a finer world within the world.""Christmas is the day that holds all time together.""Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.""Every man's road in life is marked by the graves of his personal liking.""Everything is sweetened by risk.""How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.""I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.""I would rather be remembered by a song than by a victory.""If the egotist is weak, his egotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full of distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a possession of the race.""If you do your fair day's work, you are certain to get your fair day's wage - in praise or pudding, whichever happens to suit your taste.""If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.""If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness.""In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place to-day, it is vain to seek it there to-morrow. You can not lay a trap for it.""Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.""The dead keep their secrets, and in a while we shall be as wise as they - and as taciturn.""The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.""The saddest thing that befalls a soul Is when it loses faith in God and woman.""The sea complains upon a thousand shores.""The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.""There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.""To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.""To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.""Trees are your best antiques.""Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of human life.""We bury love; Forgetfulness grows over it like grass: That is a thing to weep for, not the dead."
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.
Although his early work A Life Drama was highly praised, his poetry was later less well thought of and he was ridiculed as being a Spasmodic. Smith turned his attention to prose, and published Dreamthorp: Essays written in the Country (1863) and A Summer in Skye (1865). 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. A memoir of Smith by P. P. Alexander was prefixed to a volume entitled Last Leaves. See also Brisbane's Early Years Of Alexander Smith (1869) (but be aware that Brisbane's is not a scholarly work and contains errors of fact).
