White, JOSEPH BLANCO, was born at Seville, July 11, 1775, descended from an Irish Catholic family settled in Spain. He was ordained a priest in 1799, but ere long lost his faith, and in 1810 made his way to England, where he lived the rest of his life. He was tutor to Lord Holland's son (1815-16), and took orders in the English Church, was made M.A. by diploma of Oxford in 1826, settled as a member of Oriel College, lived as tutor in Whately's family at Dublin (1832-35), but fled to Liverpool when he found it impossible longer to believe in the Trinity or the endowment of doctrines or Articles. He edited at London a monthly Spanish paper, El Español (1810-14), and when it stopped was granted a pension of £250 a year from the English government. He died at Liverpool, where he had lived six years, 20th May 1841. He contributed to the Quarterly and Westminster reviews, edited the short-lived London Review, wrote Letters from Spain (1822), Practical and Internal Evidence against Catholicism (1825), Poor Man's Preservative against Popery (1825), and Second Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion (2 vols. 1833). His most important work is the posthumous autobiography, edited by J. Hamilton Thom (3 vols. 1845), a remarkable self-revelation of a profoundly religious soul seeking for a certainty that is ever impossible to find. But Blanco White's name lives best in literature by his one immortal sonnet, 'Night and Death,' which first appeared, with a dedication to Coleridge, in the Bijou for 1828. A corrected copy made by White in 1838 is printed in the Life. A third version was communicated to Mr William Sharp, editor of Sonnets of the Century, and is printed, together with the two former, in the Academy for September 12, 1891. It shows many interesting variations, and avoids the only faults of the sonnet as usually printed:
Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew
Thee by report Divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this goodly frame,
This glorious canopy of light and blue?
But through a curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the hues of the great setting flame,
Hesperus with the Host of Heaven came,
And lo! Creation broadened to man's view;
Who could have guessed such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun? or who divined
When bud, and flower, and insect lay revealed,
Thou to such countless worlds hadst made us blind?
Why should we then shun death with anxious strife?
If Light conceals so much, wherefore not Life?