Faints, and finds no delight:
White Angels take of it one piteous tone,
And mix it with your own!
Then, as He feels your chanting flow less clear,
He will but say: I hear
The sorrow of My child on earth.
There we catch the voice of our own Lionel Johnson, the poet of austere ideals, bruised and forespent by the battle; the poet of faith through an age incredulous. Bravely he faced the conflict, but no longer joyously: the maladie du siècle had touched him.
In approaching his more personal poems, we shall have to face the most serious charge ever brought against Johnson's poetry—the charge that it is lacking in true emotional quality. We are told that his lyrics spring from and express a thought rather than a feeling; and to admit this unreservedly is to imply that Johnson should have confined himself to prose. But can one admit it? The plaintive, eerie melody of "Morfydd" goes sighing through the mind:
A voice by the waters,
Wonders and cries:
Oh! what are the winds
And what are the waters?
Mine are your eyes!
One remembers, too, the splendid climax of those later lines, "To Morfydd Dead"—
God! of all thy suns:
Give me her, who on the winds
Wanders lone!
