I believe it to have been this passion for continuity that bound and kept him so absolute a Manxman, drawing his heart so persistently back to the Island that there were times (one may almost fancy) when the prospect of living his life out to the end elsewhere seemed to him a treachery to his parents' dust. I believe this same passion drew him--master as he was of varied and vocal English--to clothe the bulk of his poetry in the Manx dialect, and thereby to miss his mark with the public, which inevitably mistook him for a rustic singer, a man of the people, imperfectly educated. "I would not be forgotten in this land."-- This line of another true poet of curiously similar temperament[1] has haunted me through the reading of Brown's published letters. But Brown's was no merely selfish craving for continuity--to be remembered. By a fallacy of thought, perhaps, but by a very noble one, he transferred the ambition to those for whom he laboured. His own terror that Time might obliterate the moment: "And all this personal dream be fled," Became for his countrymen a very spring of helpfulness. _Antiquam exquirite matrem_--he would do that which they, in poverty and the stress of earning daily bread, were careless to do--would explore for them the ancient springs of faith and custom. "Dear countrymen, whate'er is left to us Of ancient heritage-- Of manners, speech, of humours, polity, The limited horizon of our stage-- Old love, hope, fear, All this I fain would fix upon the page; That so the coming age, Lost in the empire's mass, Yet haply longing for their fathers, here May see, as in a glass, What they held dear-- May say, ''Twas thus and thus They lived'; and as the time-flood onward rolls Secure an anchor for their Keltic souls."