If, without sea, and starless though it be,
For joy of the majestic beauty there,
Men shall not miss the stars, nor mourn the sea.
There has been a general acceptation of Johnson as a poet of the Irish revival which is both true and false. The heart has its own fatherland; and, while as fundamentally English in many ways as Newman himself, Johnson did throw in his lot unhesitatingly with the fortunes of the Celt. It was at first, no doubt, a poetical and devotional attraction (albeit blood, too, called, on the paternal side); the response of a keenly imaginative nature to the half-revealed magic of Celtic lore—that magic of fire and of tears. Out of this grew Lionel's passion for Ireland; albeit the glamour of her romance and her mystery, her thirst for freedom and her unnumbered woes, eventually won from him the allegiance of a very son. That fine and masterly poem which forms the title of his second volume is probably the richest fruit of this self-dedication. From the elemental pathos of "Ireland's" opening stanzas, through the bitter story of wrong and martyrdom, and the cold, terrible arraignment of the land's oppressors, the music sweeps with the majesty at once of death and of victory:
The Isle of Sorrows from of old hath trod
The stony road of unremitting wrong:
The purple winepress of the wrath of God.
Is then the Isle of Destiny indeed
To grief predestinate;
Ever foredoomed to agonize and bleed,
Beneath the scourging of eternal fate?
Yet against hope shall we still hope, and still
Beseech the eternal Will;
Our lives to this one service dedicate.
