IONICA. Smith Elder & Co., 65, Cornhill. 1858.

Good poetry seems to be almost as indestructible as diamonds. You throw it out of the window into the roar of London, it disappears in a deep brown slush, the omnibus and the growler pass over it, and by and by it turns up again somewhere uninjured, with all the pure fire lambent in its facets. No doubt thoroughly good specimens of prose do get lost, dragged down the vortex of a change of fashion, and never thrown back again to light. But the quantity of excellent verse produced in any generation is not merely limited, but keeps very fairly within the same proportions. The verse-market is never really glutted, and while popular masses of what Robert Browning calls "deciduous trash" survive their own generation, only to be carted away, the little excellent, unnoticed book gradually pushes its path up silently into fame.

These reflections are not inappropriate in dealing with the small volume of 116 pages called Ionica, long ago ushered into the world so silently that its publication did not cause a single ripple on the sea of literature. Gradually this book has become first a rarity and then a famous possession, so that at the present moment there is perhaps no volume of recent English verse so diminutive which commands so high a price among collectors. When the library of Mr. Henry Bradshaw was dispersed in November 1886, book-buyers thought that they had a chance of securing this treasure at a reasonable price, for it was known that the late Librarian of Cambridge University, an old friend of the author, had no fewer than three copies. But at the sale two of these copies went for three pounds fifteen and three pounds ten, respectively, and the third was knocked down for a guinea, because it was discovered to lack the title-page and the index. (I do not myself think it right to encourage the sale of imperfect books, and would not have spent half a crown on the rarest of volumes if I could not have the title-page. But this is only an aside, and does not interfere with the value of Ionica.)

The little book has no name on the title-page, but it is known that the author was Mr. William Johnson, formerly a master at Eton and a fellow of King's College, Cambridge. It is understood that this gentleman was born about 1823, and died in 1892. On coming into property, as I have heard, in the west of England, he took the name of Cory, So that he is doubly concealed as a poet, the anonymous-pseudonymous. As Mr. William Cory he wrote history, but there is but slight trace there of the author of Ionica. In face of the extreme rarity of his early book, friends urged upon Mr. Cory its republication, and he consented. Probably he would have done well to refuse, for the book is rather delicate and exquisite than forcible, and to reprint it was to draw public attention to its inequality. Perhaps I speak with the narrow-mindedness of the collector who possesses a treasure; but I think the appreciators of Ionica will always be few in number, and it seems good for those few to have some difficulties thrown in the way of their delights.

Shortly after Ionica appeared great developments took place in English verse. In 1858 there was no Rossetti, no Swinburne; we may say that, as far as the general public was concerned, there was no Matthew Arnold and no William Morris. This fact has to be taken into consideration in dealing with the tender humanism of Mr. Johnson's verses. They are less coruscating and flamboyant than what we became accustomed to later on. The tone is extremely pensive, sensitive, and melancholy. But where the author is at his best, he is not only, as it seems to me, very original, but singularly perfect, with the perfection of a Greek carver of gems. The book is addressed to and intended for scholars, and the following piece, although really a translation, has no statement to that effect. Before I quote it, perhaps I may remind the ladies that the original is an epigram in the Greek Anthology, and that it was written by the great Alexandrian poet Callimachus on hearing the news that his dear friend, the poet Heraclitus—not to be confounded with the philosopher—was dead.

  _They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
  They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed
  I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
  Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

  And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
  A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,
  Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
  For Death, he taketh all away, but these he cannot take_.

No translation ever smelt less of the lamp, and more of the violet than this. It is an exquisite addition to a branch of English literature, which is already very rich, the poetry of elegiacal regret. I do not know where there is to be found a sweeter or tenderer expression of a poet's grief at the death of a poet-friend, grief mitigated only by the knowledge that the dead man's songs, his "nightingales," are outliving him. It is the requiem of friendship, the reward of one who, in Keats's wonderful phrase, has left "great verse unto a little clan," the last service for the dead to whom it was enough to be "unheard, save of the quiet primrose, and the span of heaven, and few ears." To modern vulgarity, whose ideal of Parnassus is a tap-room of howling politicians, there is nothing so offensive, as there is nothing so incredible, as the notion that a poet may hold his own comrade something dearer than the public. The author of Ionica would deserve well of his country if he had done no more than draw this piece of aromatic calamus-root from the Greek waters.

Among the lyrics which are entirely original, there are several not less exquisite than this memory of Callimachus. But the author is not very safe on modern ground. I confess that I shudder when I read:

"Oh, look at his jacket, I know him afar; How nice," cry the ladies, "looks yonder Hussar!"

It needs a peculiar lightness of hand to give grace to these colloquial numbers, and the author of Ionica is more at home in the dryad-haunted forest with Comatas. In combining classi............