Excerpt from Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country Alexander smith, the author of Dreamtkorp, was born at Kilmarnock in Ayrshire on the last day of the year 1830, and died near Edinburgh on January 5, 1867. His whole life, therefore, covered little more than half the allotted Span, and what we may call his effective life - deducting the years of immaturity - was considerably less than half of what is normal. Yet in these thirty-six years Smith touched almost the extreme heights and depths of obscurity, fame, and neglect; and this fact imparts an aspect of romance to a career which was in its outward circumstances eminently prosaic and commonplace. Smith's father was a designer of patterns for lace-work; and at some period, vaguely referred to by the biographers of the poet as in his child hood' or in 'a few years' after Alexander's birth, he found it expedient to remove to Paisley, the centre in those days of the trade in a celebrated kind of shawl which required designs similar to those used by the lace-workers. Thence, 'in a short time the family removed to Glasgow, with which city are associated Smith's youth and the opening of his literary career, and to which is dedicated the finest of his poems. The accounts of his education are equally vague. He is said to have received 'a good general education. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.