Hirst

ish Encyclopedia, and wrote many valuable arti-
cles himself, both in his own department and in
the department of rabbinical literature, philoso-
phy and ethics.

In a very literal sense of the word, Hirsch was
the Jew's ambassador to the Gentiles, the Jewish
apostle to the non-Jewish world. In carrying
the message of Judaism to what frequently was
an unsympathetic audience, he never stooped or
compromised; and he gave the non-Jew an ap-
preciation of Judaism, even as he taught the Jew
to understand Christianity. Before non-Jewish
audiences he insisted that Jesus was not a Chris-
tian, but a Jew; that the New Testament was
largely a Jewish document, with the old Mid-
rashic and Talmudic literary gems reset and re-
polished. He taught the non-Jewish world to
understand that Judaism did not end with the
Old Testament but began with it, that Jews
wrote the Bible, that it was a product of their re-
ligious genius; and to Jews he always insisted
that Israel has a "mission" to perform to unite
mankind in righteousness and peace.

[Who's Who in America, 1922-23; E. G. Hirsch,
My Religion (1925), with introduction by G. B, Levi;
The Jewish Encyc., VI (1925), 410-11; Reform Advo-
cate, May 21, 1921, Jan. 13 and May 26, 1923; Univer-
sity Record (Chicago), Apr. 1923; Central Conf. of
Am. Rabbisf Thirty-fourth Ann. Conv. (1923) ; Chi-
cago Tribune, Jan. 8, 1923.] L.L.M.

HIRST, HENRY BECK(Aug.23,i8i7-Mar.
30, 1874), poet, lawyer, was born in Philadel-
phia. His father, Thomas Hirst, was a mer-
chant ; nothing is known of his mother. His half-
brother, William L. Hirst, gained some distinc-
tion as a barrister, and in 1830, "with no other
education than that received previously at an in-
fant school/' Henry later wrote, "I entered the
office of my half-brother" to study law. At the
age of sixteen he was enrolled in the preparatory
school of the University of Pennsylvania where
he remained nine months. "I carried off the
leading honors in all my classes," he asserted,
but he apparently returned soon to his law read-
ings. He was admitted to the bar in 1843. A.
few years previous he had been in business as a
florist and seed merchant. From boyhood he had
shown an active interest in natural history. "I
studied ornithology, botany, mineralogy, and
conchology very closely/' he later wrote. A por-
tion of the above assertion is borne out by The
Book of Caged Birds (1843), a rare and queer
little volume containing a number of poems,
three of them by Hirst To his dying day Hirst
stanchly maintained that he, and not Edgar
Allan Poe, with whom for a time he was inti-
mate, was the author of "The Raven." This
statement oft repeated has been the source of a

Hirst
small sheaf of controversial literature. Hirst
was a diligent contributor to the magazines of
the day. His poems appeared in the Ladies'
Companion, the Southern Literary Messenger,
and Graham's. Some of them were signed Anna
Maria Hirst. In the forties Hirst was on the
staff of two Philadelphia papers. His first col-
lection of poems, The Coming of the Mammoth,
appeared in 1845. Three years later his most
distinguished effort, Endymion, was issued. In
1849 he published The Penance of Roland, with
a Proem dedicated to his wife, from which it may
be concluded that he was married before or dur-
ing this year. Meantime he had sacrificed his
friendship with Poe on the altar of parody. He
had distorted Poe's matchless lines in "The
Haunted Palace" to
"Never negro took a 'nip* in
Fabric half so black and bare."
Though the content of Hirst's poems is bi-
zarre, illogical, often quite negligible, he proved
himself not infrequently a master of versifica-
tion. He employed many meters, often well man-
aged, but it would be difficult to find another
poet of repute who ruined the lilt of his verse
with so many jarring and banal rhymes. The
explanation is probably to be found in the state-
ment that "Hirst was an amorous fellow who
drank absinthe at a ruinous rate" (Oberholtzer,
post, p. 302). Though he sent copies of his
books to President Grant, stating that he had re-
ceived degrees from Oxford, he was at no time
recipient of an honorary degree at home or
abroad. Undoubtedly by 1869 his dissipations
had disarranged his mind. Toward the close of
his life he became an object of pity: "Purring
like a cat and swaying his body to and fro to the
rhythm he was trying, he would jot down words
here and there with intervals left to be filled in."
His former inordinate self-esteem had developed
into insanity. He moved about the streets of
Philadelphia in strange habiliments, "imagining
himself by turns the President of the United
States and the various emperors, kings, and
queens of Europe" (Ibid,, p. 304). He was final-
ly placed in the insane department of the Block-
ley Almshouse, where he died at the age of
sixty.
[The biography of Hirst mentioned by Matthew
Woods in a letter to George Edward Woodberry (see
Appendix to Woodberry's Life of Edgar Allan Poe,
1909), has never appeared; nor has diligent search been
able to discover any manuscript material. A sketch of
Hirst by Thomas Dunn English in an obscure maga-
zine has eluded every attempt to discover it. A sketch
by Poe appears in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (4
vols., 1876), III, 209. The only authentic, carefully
documented biography of Hirst is the manuscript copy
of a master's thesis in the Columbia Univ. I4b,; "The