Heinrich Heine, another immortal, spent eight years of his agitated struggling life on what he called “a mattress-grave.” “These years of suffering seem to have effected what might be called a spiritual purification of Heine’s nature, and to have brought out all the good side of his character, whereas adversity in earlier days had only emphasized his cynicism.” Though crippled and racked with constant pain, his intellectual and creative powers were no whit dimmed. His greatest poems were written during these years of suffering from which he found relief only in death. Petrarch suffered from epilepsy, and Alfieri, one of the greatest of the Italian tragic poets, was a martyr to pain. So likewise was Leopardi, author of some immortal odes; the latter was, furthermore, deformed. It was said of him that “Pain and Love are the two-fold poetry of his existence.” Camoens, the greatest of Portuguese poets, lost his right eye attempting to board an enemy ship. After a life of incredible hardship, he died in a public almshouse worn out by disease. There are hardly any women poets, which is rather curious, as it is almost the only career that requires neither training nor paraphernalia, yet among this handful we find four, three of them being of real importance, namely: Mrs. Browning, Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson. Mrs. Browning was a chronic invalid and wrote her greatest poems, “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” while actually on her back. Mr. Edmund Gosse says of Christina Rossetti, “All we really know about her, save that she was a great saint, was that she was a great poet.” She was also a great sufferer. The most curious event of American literary history was the sudden rise of Emily Dickinson into a posthumous fame. This strange woman, who shunned publicity with a morbid terror and never left her “father’s house for any house or town,” nevertheless bequeathed to the world poems which for life and fire are unexcelled. She was an invalid. In 1863 she writes: “I was ill since September, and since April in Boston for a physician’s care. He does not let me go, yet I work in my prison, and make guests for myself. Carlo (her dog) did not come, because he would die in jail and the mountains I could not hold now, so I brought but the gods!” Frances Ridley Havergal wrote some of her most beautiful hymns on a sick bed. V NOVELISTS