more in London, never missing the meetings of the
Rhymers' Club, nor those of the council of the Irish Literary Society,
where I constantly fought out our Irish quarrels and pressed upon the
unwilling Gavan Duffy the books of our new movement. The Irish members of
Parliament looked upon us with some hostility because we had made it a
matter of principle never to put a politician in the chair, and upon other
grounds. One day, some old Irish member of Parliament made perhaps his
only appearance at a gathering of members. He recited with great emotion a
ballad of his own composition in the manner of Young Ireland, repeating
over his sacred names, Wolfe Tone, Emmet, and Owen Roe, and mourning that
new poets and new movements should have taken something of their
sacredness away. The ballad had no literary merit, but I went home with a
troubled conscience; and for a dozen years perhaps, till I began to see
the result of our work in a deepened perception of all those things that
strengthen race, that trouble remained. I had in mind that old politician
as I wrote but the other day--

"Our part
To murmur name upon name
As a mother names her child."

The Rhymers had begun to break up in tragedy, though we did not know that
till the play had finished. I have never found a full explanation of that
tragedy; sometimes I have remembered that, unlike the Victorian poets,
almost all were poor men, and had made it a matter of conscience to turn
from every kind of money-making that prevented good writing, and that
poverty meant strain, and for the most part, a refusal of domestic life.
Then I have remembered that Johnson had private means, and that others who
came to tragic ends, had wives and families. Another day I think that
perhaps our form of lyric, our insistence upon emotion which has no
relation to any public interest, gathered together, overwrought, unstable
men; and remember the moment after that the first to go out of his mind
had no lyrical gift, and that we valued him mainly because he seemed a
witty man of the world; and that a little later another who seemed, alike
as man and writer, dull and formless, went out of his mind, first burning
poems which I cannot believe would have proved him as the one man who saw
them claims, a man of genius. The meetings were always decorous and often
dull; some one would read out a poem and we would comment, too politely
for the criticism to have great value; and