EBENEZER

JONES (182o-186o)  , British poet, was born in Islington, London, on the loth of January 182o . His father, who was of Welsh extraction, was a strict Calvinist, and Ebenezer was educated at a dull, middle-class school . The death of his father obliged him to become a clerk in the office of a tea merchant . Shelley and Carlyle were his spiritual masters, and he spent all his spare time in reading and writing; but he developed an exaggerated style of thought and expression, due partly to a defective education . The unkind reception of his Studies of Sensation and Event (1843) seemed to be the last drop in his bitter cup of life . Baffled and disheartened, he destroyed his manuscripts . He earned his living as an accountant and by literary hack work, and it was not until he was rapidly dying of consumption that he wrote his three remarkable poems, " Winter Hymn to the Snow," " When the World is Burning" and "To Death." The fame that these and some of the pieces in the early volume brought to their author came too late . He died on the 14th of September 186o . It was not till 187o that Dante Gabriel Rossetti praised his work in Notes and Queries . Rossetti's example was followed by W . B . Scott, Theodore Watts-Dunton, who contributed some papers on the subject to the Athenaeum (September and October 1878), and R .

H .

Sheppard, who edited Studies of Sensation and Event in 1879 .