“Apollo,” she says, “has a class of might-have-beens whom he loves: poets bred in melancholy places, under disabilities, with thwarted growth and thinned voices; poets compounded of everything magical and fair, like an elixir which is the outcome of knowledge and patience, and which wants, in the end, even as common water would, the essence of immortality.” It is not quite easy to tell why she delighted so absolutely in digging for ore in spots of incredible difficulty. It was not that she was ill-grounded in the greater, more entirely accepted cults. Shakespeare was hers and Milton, and in Dante she did authoritative work. And it is idle to wonder whether, so many of the big critical jobs being done, she had a keen eye to the market value of such unconsidered trifles as were left. The practical worth of a task would never have been an incentive; it might have been a deterrent. Like Mangan, there was that in her which bade her not to cross the street to advance her own interests; it persuaded her to what seemed even wilful adoption of the losing cause. (That she did, in many senses, harness herself to drudgery, as life drove her the more pitilessly to the wall, is the more to her lasting renown; by nature she was single in devotion to the tasks she loved and ready to forswear the body’s ease.) Nor was her attachment to the imperfectly known by any means the pleasure of the chase, the exhilaration of the hunt when dates and genealogical and critical sequences had “gone away” from her hounds of scent and swiftness. It was simply true that she had an inextinguishable love for the souls “ordained to fail.” As it made no difference to her whether a lasting line of verse were hers or another’s, so she had the patience of the born annalist in picking up and conserving every least coin of the realm of letters or of manly and romantic deeds. One of the floating bits of wreckage she gave a hand to confirming in the illustrious place given him by a few discerning minds, was Mangan, the uniquely brilliant author of an authoritative version of My Dark Rosaleen, a perverse and suffering soul, prey to a blackness of mind and the Nemesis of his own wandering will. There were “two Mangans,” she quotes from a previous biographer, “one well known to the Muses, the other to the police; one soared through the empyrean and sought the stars, the other lay too often in the gutters of Peter Street and Bride Street.” He was a worshipper of that which is above us, and prey to what is below, the body’s slave, the poor brain’s mistaken ministrant, striving alternately to fire it to new apprehensions and drug it with a despair of its own possibilities. In this Study, James Clarence Mangan, (1897) Louise Guiney says: