Shortly after Ionica appeared great developments took place in English verse.  In 1858 there was no Rossetti, no Swinburne; we may say that, as far as the general public was concerned, there was no Matthew Arnold and no William Morris.  This fact has to be taken into consideration in dealing with the tender humanism of Mr. Johnson’s verses.  They are less coruscating and flamboyant than what we became accustomed to later on.  The tone is extremely pensive, sensitive, and melancholy.  But where the author is at his best, he is not only, as it seems to me, very original, but singularly perfect, with the perfection of a Greek carver of gems.  The book is addressed to and intended for scholars, and the following piece, although really a translation, has no statement to that effect.  Before I quote it, perhaps I may remind the ladies that the original is an epigram in the Greek Anthology, and that it was written by the great Alexandrian poet Callimachus on hearing the news that his dear friend, the poet Heraclitus—­not to be confounded with the philosopher—­was dead.

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead; They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

  And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
  A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,
  Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
  For Death, he taketh all away, but these he cannot take.

No translation ever smelt less of the lamp, and more of the violet than this.  It is an exquisite addition to a branch of English literature, which is already very rich, the poetry of elegiacal regret.  I do not know where there is to be found a sweeter or tenderer expression of a poet’s grief at the death of a poet-friend, grief mitigated only by the knowledge that the dead man’s songs, his “nightingales,” are outliving him.  It is the requiem of friendship, the reward of one who, in Keats’s wonderful phrase, has left “great verse unto a little clan,” the last service for the dead to whom it was enough to be “unheard, save of the quiet primrose, and the span of heaven, and few ears.”  To modern vulgarity, whose ideal of Parnassus is a tap-room of howling politicians, there is nothing so offensive, as there is nothing so incredible, as the notion that a poet may hold his own comrade something dearer than the public.  The author of Ionica would deserve well of his country if he had done no more than draw this piece of aromatic calamus-root from the Greek waters.

Among the lyrics which are entirely original, there are several not less exquisite than this memory of Callimachus.  But the author is not very safe on modern ground.  I confess that I shudder when I read: 

  “Oh, look at his jacket, I know him afar;
  How nice,” cry the ladies, “looks yonder Hussar!”