And at last comes the plaintive tenderness of that call to Mary:
Praying thy Son, even as we pray thee now,
For thy dear sake to set thine Ireland free:
Pray thou, thy little Child!
Ah! who can help her, but in mercy He?
Pray then, pray thou for Ireland, Mother mild!
There are numerous shorter poems in both volumes treating of the same subject: notably those powerful lines "To Parnell," and the elegy beginning,
But "for a' that and a' that," Lionel Johnson was no Celtic poet. One critic has asserted that in him the Irish revival lost "its poet of firmest fibre and its most resonant voice—the only voice in which there was the cordial of a great courage." But when all is said, it was a voice from without. Perhaps the clearest way to draw this distinction is to set side by side Johnson's treatment of a Celtic theme with, for instance, that of Mr. Yeats. The latter's poem on the "Death of Cuhoolin" ends thus:
Stood up, and came to the long sands alone:
And the waves flowed above him, and he died:
This is by no means a superlative example of the Irish poet's work, but it has caught something of the crude, epic, dream-like simplicity of a primitive saga. Now in "Cyhiraeth," Johnson has embodied the story of Llewellyn of Llanarmon
