Richard Henry Horne

Richard Henry Horne or Richard Hengist Horne, 1802-84, English author. His chief work was the allegorical poem Orion (1843). A New Spirit of the Age (1844), written with Elizabeth Barrett (later Elizabeth Barrett Browning) and others, contains social and literary studies. His correspondence with Miss Barrett was published in 1877. Of his plays, he was best known for the tragedies Cosmo de' Medici and The Death of Marlowe (both: 1837).

Horne, Richard Henry or Richard Hengist Horne (1802–84), made his name with Orion, an allegorical epic which he published in 1843 at a farthing ‘to mark the public contempt into which epic poetry had fallen’. The poem deals with the myth of Orion, portrayed as ‘a Worker and a Builder for his fellow men’, and contrasted with Akinetos, the ‘Great Unmoved’, or Apathy. Horne wrote several blank verse tragedies, influenced by Webster, and adapted various plays for the stage; contributed many articles to Dickens's Daily News and Household Words; and published other volumes of verse. In 1852, in the midst of the gold fever, he went to Australia and stayed until 1869. E. B. Browning collaborated with him in his A New Spirit of the Age (1844) and Horne published two volumes of her letters to him (1877).