and wrote a novel, Alfred Hagart's Household, which was serialised in Good Words in 1865. Smith's 1857 poem "Glasgow" was adapted into song in 2022 by Revival-Folk band :Bird in the Belly for their concept album :After the City. Family Alexander and Flora had five children: Flora Macdonald (1858–1867) Jessie Catherine (Murray) (1860–1941) went to Australia where she married James Morris Charles Kenneth Macleod (1862–1890) died in Calcutta, India Marcella MacLellan (1864–1865) (7 months) Isabella Mary Macdonald (1866–1939) went to an uncle at Ord; she married Dr James Pender Smith. With Alexander's death, Flora's life turned to tragedy. Her mother had died the previous summer. Now, in the space of three months and a few days, she lost her husband, her father, and her eldest child. Only two months after that, McCulloch, who was probably the family's best friend in Edinburgh, died. McCulloch's widow, Flora's cousin, left for Australia, and died on the voyage. 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." Notes References Further reading Eyre-Todd, George, The Glasgow Poets / Their Lives and Poems, William Hodge & Co. (1903) Dictionary of Literary Biography: Alexander Smith, Detroit: Gale, (1984) Victorian Poetry 42.4, Special issue on the Spasmodics, ed. Jason R. Rudy, West Virginia University Press (2004) Contemporary reviews of Smith's work can be found online by using Google Book Search. External links A Summer in Skye : full book available online. Essays by Alexander Smith at Quotidiana.org Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Alexander Smith 1829 births 1867 deaths Scottish male poets 19th-century Scottish poets 19th-century British male writers