y rare kind of poetry in a very rare
little book, like fine wine in a small and precious flask. The author
never put his name to the book--indeed for many years it was not known who
wrote the volume. We now know that the author was a school teacher called
William Johnson who, later in life, coming into a small fortune, changed
his name to William Cory. He was born sometime about 1823, and died in
1892. He was, I believe, an Oxford man and was assistant master of Eton
College for a number of years. Judging from his poems, he must have found
pleasure in his profession as well as pain. There is a strange sadness
nearly always, but this sadness is mixed with expressions of love for the
educational establishment which he directed, and for the students whose
minds he helped to form. He must have been otherwise a very shy man.
Scarcely anything seems to be known about him after his departure from
educational circles, although everybody of taste now knows his poems. I
wish to speak of them because I think that literary graduates of this
university ought to be at least familiar with the name "Ionica." At all
events you should know something about the man and about the best of his
poems. If you should ask why so little has yet been said about him in
books on English literature, I would answer that in the first place he was
a very small poet writing in the time of giants, having for competitors
Tennyson, Browning and others. He could scarcely make his small pipe heard
in the thunder of those great organ tones. In the second place his verses
were never written to please the public at all. They were written only for
fine scholars, and even the titles of many of them cannot be explained by
a person devoid of some Greek culture. So the little book, which appeared
quite early in the Victorian Age, was soon forgotten. Being forgotten it
ran out of print and disappeared. Then somebody remembered that it had
existed. I have told you that it was like the tone of a little pipe or
flute as compared with the organ music of the larger poets. But the little
pipe happened to be a Greek pipe--the melody was very sweet and very
strange and old, and people who had heard it once soon wanted to hear it
again. But they could not get it. Copies of the first edition fetched
extraordinary sums. Some few years ago a new edition appeared, but this
too is now out of print and is fetching fancy prices. However, you must
not expect anything too wonderful from th