Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

Coliseum, the most sublime result to be obtained from the situation would be produced by repeating to himself the simple words, "This is Rome." By these words the totality of the city's grandeur, influence, power, and enterprises would be vaguely presented to a scholar's mind dim in the glow of a multitude of half-revealing side-lights. If a companion whispered in the scholar's ears, "This place would at one time seat a hundred thousand people," then the particular is reached, and the sublime vanishes like sunshine against a cloud. America has been explored. Australia have been traversed.

Most of North

Africa and

The source of

the Nile has been found. We can read the hieroglyphics. We know the elements now flaming in the sun. Many of the phenomena in all branches of physiology which were mysteries to our fathers are familiar commonplaces of knowledge now. We have learned to foretell the weather. We travel a thousand miles for the hundred travelled by our fathers. We have daily newspapers to discuss all matters, clear away mysteries. We have opened the

grave for the sublime with the plough of progress. Though the words stick in my. throat, I must, I daresay, cry, "God speed the plough!"

A BORROWED POET.

TWENTY years ago I borrowed, and read for the first time, the poems of James Clarence Mangan. I then lived in a city containing not one-third as many people as yearly swell the population of London. The friend of whom I borrowed the volume in 1866 is still living in his old home, in the house from which I carried away the book then. I saw him last winter and he is almost as little aged as the hills he has fronted all that time. I have had in those years as many homes as an Arab nomad. He still stays in the old place, and in the gray twilight of dark summer mornings wakes to hear as of yore the twitter of sparrows and the cawing of rooks from the other side of the river, and the hoarse hooting of the steamboat hard by.

The volume of Mangan now by me I borrowed of another old friend, who passes most of his day within sight of that familiar river not quite a hundred yards from the house of the lender of twenty years back. In the meantime I have seen no other copy of Mangan.

This latest fact is not much to be wondered at, for I am not enterprising in the matter of books -rarely buy and rarely borrow, and have never been in the reading room of the British Museum in my life. The book may be common to those who know much about books; but I have seen only the two copies I speak of, and these are of the same edition and of American origin. I believe a selection from the poems was issued a few years ago in Dublin, but a copy has not drifted my way. The title-page of the volume before me is missing, but in a list of publications at the back I find "The Poems of James Clarence Mangan. Containing German Anthology, Irish Anthology, Apocrypha, and Miscellaneous Poems. With a Biographical and Critical Introduction, by John Mitchel. 1 vol. 12mo. Printed on tinted and

calendered paper. Nearly 500 pages. $1."

Beyond all doubt this is the book, and it was published by Mr. P. M. Haverty, of New York.

As far as I know, this is the only edition of Mangan which pretends to be even comprehensive. It does not lay claim to completeness. At the time the late John Mitchel wrote his introduction he was aware of but one other edition of Mangan's poems-the German Anthology, published in Dublin many years ago. I am nearly sure that since the appearance of Mitchel's edition there have been no verses of Mangan's published in book form on this side of the Atlantic, except the selections I have already mentioned, and I do not think any edition whatever has been published in this country.

During the twenty years which have elapsed since first I made the acquaintance of the poems of James Clarence Mangan, I have read much verse and many criticisms of verse, and yet I don't remember to have seen one line about Mangan in any publication issued in England. I believe two magazine articles have appeared, but I never saw them. Almost during these

« AnteriorContinuar »