Alexander Smith

The exact date of Smith's birth is uncertain. Statutory registration had not yet been introduced, and no record of the birth or baptism it is indexed in any of the church records held by National Records of Scotland. Smith's ages given in the census, marriage, and death records narrow it down to (possibly) late 1828, 1829, or early 1830. Web searches return 1829 and 1830 roughly equally, with more recent authors favouring 1829. Smith's friends Thomas Brisbane

The inscription is: "Alexander Smith, poet and essayist. Born at Kilmarnock, 31st Dec. 1829; Died at Wardie, 5th Jan. 1867", and at the base it has carved 'Erected by some of his personal friends'.

Smith turned his attention to prose, and published Dreamthorp: Essays written in the Country (1863), noted especially for the essay A Lark's Flight, in which Smith describes the song of a lark breaking the silence just before the trapdoor is sprung under two condemned men.

Family

Alexander and Flora had five children: Flora Macdonald (1858–1867) Jessie Catherine (Murray) (1860–1941) went to Australia where she married James Morris Flora, who had come from a beautiful and fairly isolated place, was left in a Victorian metropolis with three small children. She died in 1873, aged forty-four; her death certificate gives the causes of death as cardiac disease, apoplexy, and alcoholism.

Quotations

"Stirling, like a huge brooch clasps Highlands and Lowlands together". "In Scotland one is continually coming into contact with an unreasonable prejudice against English manners, institutions, and forms of thought; and in her expression of these prejudices Scotland is frequently neither great nor dignified. There is a narrowness and touchiness about her which is more frequently found in villages than in great cities. She continually suspects that the Englishman is about to touch her thistle rudely, or to take liberties with her unicorn."