Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river That sweeps along to the mighty sea; God will inspire me while I deliver My soul to thee! Tell thou the world, when bones lie whitening Amid the last homes of youth and eld, That there once was one whose veins ran lightning No eye beheld. Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour, How shone for him, through his griefs and gloom, No star of all heaven sends to light our Path to the tomb. Roll on, my song, and to after-ages Tell how, disdaining all earth can give, He would have taught men from wisdom’s pages The way to live. And tell how trampled, derided, hated, And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong, He fled for shelter to God, who mated His soul with song— With song which alway, sublime or rapid, Flowed like a rill in the morning beam, Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid— A mountain stream. Tell how the Nameless, condemned for years long To herd with demons from hell beneath, Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long For even death. Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love, With spirit shipwrecked, and young hopes blasted, He still, still strove. There may be lyrical impulse here, but it is of quite an ordinary quality. The much vaunted line about “veins that ran lightning,” could, I think, be paralleled out of previous poets, and the first half of it is clumsy and cacophonous. “Night-hour” and “light our” might have stepped straight out of the comic poets, and the same may be said of “years long” and “tears, long,” which J. K. Stephen would have chortled over for a “metrical effect.” And when we come to “still, still strove” we are among the librettists with a vengeance. I have seen James Clarence Mangan collocated with Poe. If comparisons with America must be made, we should range him alongside that bright spirit, Ella Wheeler Wilcox. For Sir Samuel Fergusson, he has been highly praised by Mr. Swinburne, Aubrey de Vere, and, of course, by Mr. W. B. Yeats. Mr. Yeats pronounces him to be “the greatest poet Ireland has produced, one who, among the somewhat sybaritic singers of his day was like some aged sea-king sitting among the inland wheat and poppies—the savor of the sea about him and its strength.” Harken to the ancient sea-king: