WILLIAM ALLINGHAM

(1828-1889)

Each form of verse has, in addition to its laws of structure, a subtle quality as difficult to define as the perfume of a flower.  The poem, ’An Evening,’ given below, may be classified both as a song and as a lyric; yet it needs no music other than its own rhythms, and the full close to each verse which falls upon the ear like a soft and final chord ending a musical composition.  A light touch and a feeling for shades of meaning are required to execute such dainty verse.  In ‘St. Margaret’s Eve,’ and in many other ballads, Allingham expresses the broader, more dramatic sweep of the ballad, and reveals his Celtic ancestry.

The lovable Irishman, William Allingham, worked hard to enter the brotherhood of poets.  When he was only fourteen his father took him from school to become clerk in the town bank of which he himself was manager.  “The books which he had to keep for the next seven years were not those on which his heart was set,” says Mr. George Birkbeck Hill.  But this fortune is almost an inevitable part, and probably not the worst part, of the training for a literary vocation; and he justified his ambitions by pluckily studying alone till he had mastered Greek, Latin, French, and German.

Mr. Hill, in his ‘Letters of D.G.  Rossetti’ (Atlantic Monthly, May, 1896), thus quotes Allingham’s own delightful description of his early home at Ballyshannon, County Donegal:—­

“The little old town where I was born has a voice of its own, low, solemn, persistent, humming through the air day and night, summer and winter.  Whenever I think of that town I seem to hear the voice.  The river which makes it rolls over rocky ledges into the tide.  Before spreads a great ocean in sunshine or storm; behind stretches a many-islanded lake.  On the south runs a wavy line of blue mountains; and on the north, over green rocky hills rise peaks of a more distant range.  The trees hide in glens or cluster near the river; gray rocks and bowlders lie scattered about the windy pastures.  The sky arches wide over all, giving room to multitudes of stars by night, and long processions of clouds blown from the sea; but also, in the childish memory where these pictures live, to deeps of celestial blue in the endless days of summer.  An odd, out-of-the-way little town, ours, on the extreme western edge of Europe; our next neighbors, sunset way, being citizens of the great new republic, which indeed, to our imagination, seemed little if at all farther off than England in the opposite direction.”

Of the cottage in which he spent most of his childhood and youth he writes:—­