For those who care at all passionately for the precious things of literature, the work of Lionel Johnson will always remain a cherished and secluded nook. The man was a scholar, a poet, and a critic, whose dominant note was gracile lucidity. A friend writing of his personal appearance at the time of his death said, ‘Thin, pale, very delicate he looked, with a twitching of the facial muscles, which showed even at the age of twenty-four how unfit was his physique to support the strain of an abnormally nervous organization. Quick and mouselike in his movements, reticent of speech and low-voiced, he looked like some old-fashioned child who had strayed by chance into an assembly of men. But a child could not have shown that inward smile of appreciative humour, a little aloof, a little contemptuous perhaps, that worked constantly around his mouth. He never changed except in the direction of a greater pallor and a greater fragility.’ Cloistral mysticism was the key-chord of his two volumes of poetry (1895 and 1897). In some respects he seems to have strayed out of the seventeenth century of Crashaw and Herbert. His early training, no doubt, engendered this aspect. After six years in the grey Gothic school of Winchester he passed on to New College, Oxford. Here he came under the influence of Pater, and was charmed by the latter’s then somewhat hieratic austerity. A devout Irish Catholic, he was moved by three themes: his old school, Oxford, and Ireland, and to these he unfortunately too often devoted his muse. After the quiet seclusion of his Oxford years, on entering the vortex of London literary life he found that the world of wayfaring was a somewhat rough passage in the mire for one so delicate. Out of the struggle between his scholarly aspirations and the cry of his time for life, more life, was woven perhaps the finest of all his poems, _The Dark Angel_: Dark angel, with thine aching lust To rid the world of penitence: Malicious angel, who still dost My soul such subtile violence!-- Because of thee, the land of dreams Becomes a gathering place of fears: Until tormented slumber seems One vehemence of useless tears.... Thou art the whisper in the gloom, The hinting tone, the haunting laugh: Thou art the adorner of my tomb, The minstrel of mine epitaph. Most of his poems are subjective, and the majority have a certain stiffness of movement of a priest laden with chasuble; but sometimes, however, as in _Mystic and Cavalier_, or in the lines on the statue of Charles I at Charing Cross, he writes with a winsome charm and freedom of spirit: Armoured he rides, his head Bare to the stars of doom: He triumphs now, the dead Beholding London’s gloom....