Lee-Hamilton, Eugene Jacob

(1845-1907)

   Born in London, he lived with his widowed mother in Pau, in the Aquitaine Region of France, then around 1854 they moved to Paris. He entered Oriel College, Oxford, in 1864 but left without graduating to follow a diplomatic career. He was at the embassy at Tours, Bordeaux, and Versailles during the Franco-German war (1870-1871) and was third secretary in Lisbon in 1873. For the next twenty years, although an invalid living with his mother in Florence, he was highly creative. The grief he experienced when his one-year-old daughter died in 1904 is expressed in Mimma Bella (1909), a volume of elegiac sonnets. He died of a stroke and was buried in the new Protestant cemetery outside the Porta Romana, Florence. Some of his other publications: Poems and Transcripts, 1878. Imaginary Sonnets, 1888. The Fountain of Youth, 1891. Sonnets of the Wingless Hours, 1894. Forest Notes, 1899. Some of his poems: "A Spanish Legend," "Alexander Selkirk to His Shadow," "Among the Firs," "Eagles of Tiberius," "James Watt to the Spirit of His Kettle," "Luther to a Blue-Bottle Fly," "Sunken Gold."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Selected Poems of Eugene Lee-Hamilton. The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (http://library.stanford.edu). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.co lumbiagrangers.org). The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. Christopher Ricks, ed. Oxford University Press, 1987. The Sonnet: An Anthology. Robert M. Bender and Charles L. Squier, eds. Washington Square Press, 1987.