Behold him passing through our streets with a quick yet shuffling gait, as if some uneasiness hurried him onward, pausing not, looking not to the right or left, until brought suddenly to a full stop before a bookstand. See how eagerly he searches there for some old volume of German black-letter. If it is found, and his finances can secure its purchase, lo! what a flash of joyous feeling lights up those before heavy and lustreless eyes! He passes onward, his pace quickening to a run, until, in the solitude of his lonely chamber, he can commune with his new treasure. Clarence Mangan was about five feet six in height, thin even to emaciation, and slightly stooped in the shoulders, like many men of studious habits and close application. In his dress the eccentricity of his mind was outwardly displayed. His coat, the very little coat, tightly buttoned, was neither a frock coat, dress coat, morning coat, nor shooting coat, and yet seemed to partake of the fashioning of all four. Sometimes, however, it was covered with a blue cloak, the tightest cloak to the form that can be imagined, in which every attempt at the bias cut that gives a free flowing drapery was rigidly eschewed. But it was in the article of hats that poor Clarence's eccentric fancy was especially shown. Such a quaint-shaped crown, such a high, wide-boated leaf as he fancied, has rarely been seen off the stage.-PRICE, JAMES, 1849, Recollections of Mangan, Dublin Evening Packet.

In the month of June, 1849, the cholera morbus raged in Dublin; temporary hospitals were erected by the Board of Health for the reception of pauper sufferers from this district, and servants of the Board were despatched with carts to all parts of the city for the purpose of bringing to those hospitals the persons attacked by this dreadful epidemic. While searching for this purpose in an obscure portion of Dublin, the servants of the Board of Health were informed that the tenant of a single room, in one of the most wretched houses of the neighbourhood, had been for some time confined to his bed, and was supposed to be suffering from cholera morbus. They ascended to the lodging thus indicated, and there, stretched on a wretched pallet, and surrounded by proofs of the most squalid misery, they found the wretched form of a man, insensible from exhaustion.

Believing that he was reduced to this. state by cholera, the servants of the Board of Health placed the sufferer in their cart, and conveyed him to the North Dublin Union cholera sheds. In this miserable wreck of hunger and misery the attendant physician recognised James Clarence Mangan. Upon examination it was found. that his disease was not cholera, but absolute starvation. He was immediately transmitted to the Meath Hospital, where everything that skill and kindness could suggest for the purpose of reviving the expiring spark of life was attempted-and attempted in vain. This unfortunate child of genius sank hourly, and died shortly after his admission to the hospital, exhibiting, to the last, his gentle nature, in repeated apologies for the trouble he gave, and constant thanks for the attentions and assistance afforded to him.-ELLIS, HERCULES, 1850, ed., Romances and Ballads of Ireland

son.

Mangan was not only an Irishman,—not only an Irish papist,-not only an Irish papist rebel; but throughout his whole literary life of twenty years, he never deigned to attorn to English criticism, never published a line in any English periodical, or through any English bookseller, never seemed to be aware that there was a British public to please. He was a rebel politically, and a rebel intellectually and spiritually, a rebel with his whole heart and soul against the whole British. spirit of the age. The consequence was sure, and not unexpected. Hardly anybody in England knew the name of such a perThe first time the present biographer saw Clarence Mangan, it was in this wise-Being in the college library, and having occasion for a book in that gloomy apartment of the institution called the "Fagel Library," which is the innermost recess of the stately building, an acquaintance pointed out to me a man. perched on the top of a ladder, with the whispered information that the figure was Clarence Mangan. It was an unearthy and ghostly figure, in a brown garment; the same garment (to all appearance) which lasted till the day of his death. The blanched hair was totally unkept; the corpse-like features still as marble; a large book was in his arms, and all his soul was in the book. I had never heard of Clarence Mangan before, and

knew not for what he was celebrated; whether as a magician, a poet, or a murderer; yet [I] took a volume and spread it on a table, not to read, but with pretence of reading to gaze on the spectral creature upon the ladder. Here Mangan laboured mechanically, and dreamed, roosting on a ladder, for certain months, perhaps years; carrying the proceeds in money to his mother's poor home, storing in his memory the proceeds which were not in money but in another kind of ore, which might feed the imagination indeed, but was not available for board and lodging. this time he was the bond-slave of opium. -MITCHEL, JOHN, 1859, ed., Poems by James Clarence Mangan, Memoir, pp. 8, 13.

All

When he emerged into daylight he was dressed in a blue cloak, midsummer or midwinter, and a hat of fantastic shape, under which golden hair as fine and silky as a woman's hung in unkempt tangles, and deep blue eyes lighted a face as colourless as parchment. He looked like. a spectre of some German romance, rather than a living creature.- DUFFY, SIR CHARLES GAVAN, 1880, Young Ireland, p. 297.

His comrades were strange shadows, the bodyless creations wherein his ecstasy was most cunning. Phantoms trooped to him from the twilight land, lured, as Ulysses lured the ghosts of Hades.

We

seem to see him hurrying on his life, most melancholy journey, as they saw him gliding through the Dublin streets like the embodiment of the weird fancies of Hoffmann, a new student Anselmus, haunted by the eyes of a visionary Veronica, or buried among books, as Mitchel first found him, his brain, like a pure flame refining all he read and transmuting it to something rich and strange. Of his real life, the existence burning itself fiercely out behind that ghastly mask, few knew anything, but it was not all unhappy. He had loved and been loved; there were moments in his wasted existence, even long intervals, of calm and peace. But Mangan's But Mangan's life is one of unmitigated gloom. Life was to Mangan one long interval. "No one wish of his heart," says Mitchel, "was ever fulfilled; no aspiration satisfied." If he could have faced the denials of destiny with an austere renunciation, if he could have opposed a monastic fortitude to the buffets of the

world, his might have been a serener if not a happier story. But a passionate longing after the ideal drove him to those deadly essences which fed for a time the hot flame of his genius at the price of his health, his reason, and his life. Genius and misery have been bed-fellows and boardbrothers often enough, but they have seldom indeed been yoked together under conditions as tragic as those which make Mangan's story a record of despair.MCCARTHY, JUSTIN HUNTLY, Hours with Great Irishmen.

From cradle to coffin "Melancholy marked him for her own," and his heart always knew its own bitterness. Infinitely sensitive, of a fragile and tremulous spirit, the harshness of the world was his master, and from the first he succumbed to whatever miseries, real or imagined, came his way. The story of his life is a story of persistent gloom and grayness, peopled by phantoms and phantasies of sorrow: he was a born dreamer of dreams, and passed his days in a kind of penumbra. He was gentle and grotesque, eccentric and lovable: but much of a mystery to all and to himself. Fit for nothing but literature, and passionately enamoured of it, he was a desultory, uncertain, capricious writer: always a student with a true love of learning, his knowledge was casual, imperfect, hardly a scholar's. Further, it was a part of his strange nature to be innocently insincere, or inventive, or imaginative, about himself and his: there was "a deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck" in his composition, and he throws dust in the eyes of his readers, who vainly try to ascertain the precise measure of truth and actuality in his personal or literary statements. With all his devotion to letters and learning, he was incapable of exercising a prolonged and constant energy: it was not in him to concentrate and control his powers. When he wrote without inspiration, but in obedience to some external call or need, he wrote either with a strong and arid rhetoric or with a somewhat ghastly air of mocking merriment and jesting cynicism and so little could he command his imagination that almost the whole of his greatest and most perfect work owes its inception to the work-often the inferior work of others. JOHNSON, LIONEL, 1900, A Treasury of Irish Poetry, eds. Brooke and Rolleston, p. 241.

Thou, too, art a Bard-and thy Spirit's River Is fed by each streamlet from her founts of Song;

Pure thro' her frowning glens it glides in darkness,

It sparkles in her sunshine pure and strong. -FITZGERALD, WILLIAM, 1847, Dublin University Magazine.

I believe there is in these United States quite enough of the Celtic blood and warmth of temperament, enough too of the true Gaelic ear for melody, to recognize in the poems of Mangan that marvellous charm which makes him the household and heart-enshrined darling of many an Irish home. I have never yet met a cultivated Irishman or woman, of genuine Irish nature, who did not prize Clarence Mangan above all the poets that their island of song ever nursed. This one fact, singular as it must needs appear to the Duyckincks, makes it worth while surely to understand with what wand of power, and what musical incantations he wrought so wondrous a magic. MITCHEL, JOHN, 1859, ed., Poems by James Clarence Mangan, Memoir, p. 8.

He is inimitable-the very prince of translators. He is among the few writers. of any time or country who have succeeded in transfusing into their own language not merely the literal meaning, graces of style, and musical movement of foreign poems, but also their true spirit and suggestiveness. Often his translation far surpasses the original. He was a most accomplished linguist, and translated from the Irish, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish, as well as Turkish and other Asiatic tongues.-MURRAY, JOHN KANE, 1877-84, Lessons in English Literature, p. 367.

In many respects, both in life and genius, Mangan bears a resemblance to Edgar A. Poe, and, if he did not achieve a single marked success like"The Raven,

...

his poetical faculty was of the same sombre sort, and his command of original and musical rhythm almost equally great. . . . His original poems are quite few in number, but display the same command of original and powerful rhythm and impressive diction as his translations, while their spirit of hopelessness is beyond any artificial pathos. There is hardly anything more profoundly affecting in English literature than such a poem as "The Nameless One," read with a knowledge of the life of which it was confession; and it

is the more impressive that it has no bitterness nor maudlin arraignment of fortune, such as is apparent in much of the poetry of genius wrecked by its own errors. His political odes were those of a dreamer of noble things for his country, rather than of practical knowledge or faith, notwithstanding their exalted and noble sentiment, and in all things except his personal misery he was not of the actual life of the world.-WILLIAMS, ALFRED M., 1881, The Poets and Poetry of Ireland, pp. 325, 328.

He was one of the most artistic and musical of the poets of the present century, yet his verses are but little known.-RYDER, ELIOT, 1881, The Household Library of Catholic Poets, p. 46.

Ireland has not yet found a Burns to immortalise her national airs any more than she has a Scott to vivify her ancient story; yet among her sons have been many true singers, the most original, if not the greatest, of whom is Mangan. . . . In 1845, under the title of "Anthologia Germania, he published two volumes of translations from the German, and in them much of his best work is to be found. His renderings from the Irish, on the other hand, which were issued in two posthumous publications, are very disappointing and inferior; generally they are poor in execution and spiritless in tone, while in the mystic and weird minstrelsy of the Teuton, Mangan found a longing for something beyond this life akin to his own vague aspirations. Great as his merits undoubtedly are, Mangan has been so overpraised by his countrymen, who have endeavoured to give a political colouring to his writings, that English critics have been prejudiced against him, and have deemed him a mere provincial poetaster. As an original poet, it is difficult to assign

him as high a rank as his countrymen claim, but as a translator his merits are great; no one has transmitted the spirit of German ballad lore better than Mangan has, often, indeed, giving it a charm greater than the original possesses.-INGRAM, JOHN H., 1894, The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, John Keats to Lord Lytton, ed. Miles, pp. 453, 457, 458.

Is one of those Irishmen with regard to whose work a wide difference of opinion exists between his countrymen and English critics. He had certainly an ear for verse and a gift for making it, and if his equipment of ideas had been porportionate he would have been a great poet. His weakness is that, while he can say things. pleasantly, he has but little to say. WALKER, HUGH, 1897, The Age of Tennyson, p. 66.

Several references have already been made to Mangan's incorrigible love of unusual and difficult rhymes and complicated metres, and it has been shown that the concoction of mere rhymes had been a favourite pastime with him from youth. He clearly found the early habit ineradicable, and abandoned it only in his last days when he had themes which moved his very soul. Then the notes of the organ, the trumpet tones of his higher self would roll forth in majesty and power. So much of his poetical work is characterised or, as may be held, defaced by intellectual jugglery, that of his eight hundred and more poems, about three hundred only are worthy of preservation. If he is never prosaic, he is too often eccentric. Mangan's position in Irish poetry is a matter of difference of opinion among Irishmen. Even many of those who admire his work extremely are not altogether disposed to place him above Moore. Yet in lyrical power and range, vigour of expression, variety of treatment, originality of form, mastery of technique, keenness of perception, and in other qualities, Mangan seems to be quite unapproached by any Irish poet. Some of these qualities. Some of these qualities are possessed in a greater degree by other Irish poets, but in none are they combined in such perfection as in Mangan. Some attributes there are which Mangan lacks, or possesses only in a slender degree, and his perverseness in certain directions has been to no small extent detrimental to his reputation; but, with all deductions, it is

perfectly certain that no other Irish poet is his peer in sheer imaginative power or fertility of invention. Those who admire his writings at all must admire them warmly; indifference is impossible in such a case.-O'DONOGHUE, D. J., 1897, The Life and Writings of James Clarence Mangan, pp. 199, 232.

Mangan's great work has never been overpraised: not so his less great. He was an Irishman writing English verse during the first half of the century: his wide and genuine if straggling culture, his range of literary interest, his technical mastery of verse, filled his audience with a feeling of novelty. It was a portent, a presage, of an outburst of Irish poetry in English verse such as had not before been heard: and it is not unnatural that Mangan's poetry was received, is often still received, with too lavish an applause, too indiscriminate a welcome.

The mass of Mangan's poetry seems less miraculous and immaculate now than it semed half a century ago: then, he had scarce a rival; since then, he has had many and worthy rivals, though none has surpassed him. Words, rhymes, rhythms, were always ready at his call, and he fashioned of them things ingenious, things betraying infinite resource; the ability to create by their means things of the highest beauty, unspoiled by freak or whim, undulled by conventional rhetoric, things poetically pure, was his but once and again. It would be cruel to judge such a man by anything but his supreme achievements; to exalt unduly his lesser achievements is to endanger the just glory of the poet at his loftiest and loveliest height. Mangan wrote much that must always delight lovers of poetry and of Mangan, which is yet but a small part of his title to greatness; he wrote a little which is a possession for evermore of all who "love the highest when they see it." ... Mangan's flight is highest, his music is noblest, when ancient Ireland speaks to him of her glories, her sorrows, her hopes. He is the poet of much else that is imperishable; but above all he is the poet of a poem foremost among the world's poems of inspired patriotism. It were enough for Mangan's fame that he is the poet of the "Dark Rosaleen."-JOHNSON, LIONEL, 1900, A Treasury of Irish Poetry, eds. Brooke and Rolleston, pp. 243,248,249.