An Irish Poet-Scholar

...There Is a northern note that Is very thrilling in the dramatic O Sister Dear...

...The Doctor's" house was, as Mr...

...Thy coming is the coming of a star...

...Love, and the night-storm flees away, For thy smile is the sunshine of the day...

...The Doctor" stands upon the steps of his house...

...The Gaelic poet who praised his ancestor wrote words that have an image of him in them: The handsome hawk who towered the country o'er Top-spray of all who sprang from Sigerson Mor...

...As we read his occasional verse, shortly to be published in volume form under the title Songs and Poems, we constantly come upon some living part of our history...

...But there are certain beautiful poems—poems that are an addition to Irish literature...

...Here is a poem that was made on the bringing back to Ireland of the body of an exiled soldier— And the shroud of our nation's glory Her last brave hero's pall— and as we read it we know that the famine is not twenty years in the background, and we know that loneliness lies on the land and the shadows of ruined homes...

...He was a scholar in what related to his profession...

...His profession was the most humane of professions—medicine...

...Where now shall we turn to find so bountiful a mind, such unobtrusive loyalty to an unforgotten, lofty quest, such kindness and such courtesy...

...he was nearly ninety when I took leave of him for the last time...

...it carries down from the past the gallantry of resistance...

...He had lost no touch with the world...

...The poet of such stately words had, when he spoke them, a delivery that was at once ceremonious and precise, slow-moving and sonorous...

...His forefathers must have been in Ireland from the time of the Battle of Clontarf, and yet he remained a miracle of atavism—a distinctly Norse type...

...Is In the poems about the smithy: Two friends he hath—two only— Good hammer and sweet bird, O sorrowful eyes...

...Lbw music fills the wide air with delight, For now wonder strikes the myriad chords of night...

...You teU not Who may have been the third, Or whether the thrush is singing Of summers that bore no gloom, Or whether it promiseth, sweetly, A green bough o'er a tomb, When still shall be the hammer...

...The sonorous voice of "the Doctor," his deliberate utterance, his wit that had its setting in courtesy, moderated all bitterly-held opinions...

...the northern note, too...

...He was proud of his ancestry, and proud of the Norse contribution to Irish culture...

...On Sunday evenings his friends would come to dinner to this house that was always lighted by candles...

...But he was not one to think of himself as a survival...

...Curran has said, "like some Balzac interior...

...Like Roger Casement's, like T. M. Kettle's, George Sigerson's name is there to show us how Scandinavian we are in our racial make-up...

...A meeting is being held there, but no provision was made for lighting the meeting, and the very young writer, leaving his colleagues In semi-darkness, has come across the street to ask for the loan of lights...

...a silver candelabrum, In which there are wax lights, is in his hands, and, as he passes on the lights, he says in that sonorous, rolling voice, and with the breathing-pauses which made his delivery so effective, "Mr...

...And he took a helpful and reconcihng part in the public life of his country: the poet-scholar of Bards of the Gael and Gall and The Poets and Poetry of Munster was also the writer of a report upon the treatment of political prisoners and of a History of Land Tenures in Ireland—a history written at Lord Acton's request and for Gladstone's use...

...Sigerson's method as he presided at the Monday evening meetings of the National Literary Society: How eagerly in that audience did we wait for the glancing irony which shot through the folds of his deliberate, ceremonious speech...

...C. P. Curran, in a memoir which he has aptly entitled Oisin after the Fianna...

...this is to have the sun borrow light from the moon...

...His massive speech advanced in the fashion of the classic phalanx, bristling with bright spears...

...At eighty he was working on his translation of Sedulius, making those elaborate notes and writing that scholarly introduction in which he established the fact that the writer of the first Christian epic was an Irishman...

...His university years were passed abroad, and Paris was always the metropolis of his world...

...Curran's is an admirable description of Dr...

...He had a correspondent in Germany in the great Mommsen, and correspondents in England in the persons of Lord Acton and Matthew Arnold...

...He would point out that the first poem in which Dublin is mentioned is a love-song made by a Norse king...

...With his broad shoulders and his silvery flowing hair, with his composed speech and his voice that had a tidal movement in it, he seemed like a survivor from some heroic prime...

...A very young writer has come from a house opposite "the Doctor's" in Clare Street...

...Indeed, at no time could I think of him as one whose vigor, wit, or understanding was abated, or the range of whose interest was in any way diminished...

...Silent all within, Hushed the weary clamor And the noisy din...

...His face had pallor, his voice was slower, but there was no slackness in his intellectual powers on the last occasions on which I was with him...

...French furniture of all the Louis and empires, French paintings and pastels, French miniatures and engravings...

...It is In his original poems—indeed it Is most striking in certain of his original poems...

...His wit and his courtesy come back to me from a little picture that I carry In my memory...

...through the shadows from afar...

...his only detachment was in the fact that he habitually neglected to cash cheques that were sent him...

...As we read them it will be impossible not to think of someone moving through lofty halls and looking on possessions still left him—swords and steeds and the tokens of some recognized nobility...

...And then there is the song that was sung in many gatherings: the young men who sang it never thought that its writer was living amongst them—The Mountains of Pomeroy...

...A man of humane culture through all that he did or wrote, George Sigerson was soldierly through his soldierly forefathers...

...The Sigurd in his name shows that his stock was "Norse and noble...

...In public speech, Sigerson had an art of his own," says Mr...

...He would remark that the epoch of the Norse kingdom in Dublin was a golden age in Ireland, and that it was disrupted by a usurper named Brian Boru...

...he was a scholar in literature—especially in Irish and Latin literature...

...When I remember that I would meet John O'Leary at his house in the early days, that I would meet Padraic Pearse there later, and that the last time I saw Roger Casement in Ireland was at "the Doctor's," I am impressed by the thought of how much of Ireland was included in his life—even in the segment of it known to one of my generation...

...O speak...

...There will not be found In the forthcoming collection any poem as poignant as O'Curran's Lament, or as brilliant as CuchuUaln's Lament over Fardia, to name two of the famous poems of Bards of the Gael and Gall...

...Thus he made his wit the courtesy of a kingly mind...

...At tea In the drawing-room afterward the gathering became a salon...

...But not only in his translations has he made this northern element felt...

...Nearly thirty years later, the ever-varying symbolism of Irish deliverance receives from this poet its most romantic embodiment in The Swans of Lir: Now some go east, and some go west, And some to feuds have gone, And men forget their lofty quest But still, the Swans live on: And still their song is in our souls— O'er seas of freezing foam We'll see the bright glad glowing light When the Swans of Lir come home...

...he was in unison with every generation he lived among...

...O speed, Love...

...He was near the span of threescore of years and ten when I first had the good fortune to be asked to his house...

...Naturally, too, he delighted in translating Norse poems that showed an intimacy with Irish life, and Irish poems that showed friendship for the Norse...

...All that Is said has the memory of a stately background: The splendor of all splendors with her goes, The ocean at her footfall thrills and glows...

...We must not plagiarize from ourselves," I heard him say once, and people who wanted to repeat Items out of a controversary that was going on had to think of something fresher to say...

...It was a house in which one would not look to see Bricru's Feast enacted...

...Charcot was his master—Charcot the master of the new learning—and also his associate and friend...

...and the rapid shafts of his wit lost nothing in effect from the contrast of humorous, twinkling eyes with the sonorous voice and the grave, courteous dignity of his bearing...