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Updated: May 5, 2025
I heard exaggerated stories about Americans, and especially about the Americans of the Far West, heard them, that is, represented as semi-barbarians, coarse, rash, and boastful, with bad manners and no feeling for the reticences of life. Such legends exasperated me beyond words. I felt as did the author of Ionica on re-reading the play of Ajax.
They include Journey to France, Iter Boreale, the account of a tour from Oxf. to Newark, and the Farewell to the Fairies. CORNWALL, BARRY, see PROCTER, B.W. Poet, b. at Torrington, and ed. at Eton, where he was afterwards a master. He was a brilliant writer of Latin verse. His chief poetical work is Ionica, containing poems in which he showed a true lyrical gift.
The author of Ionica seems to bring the old Greek fatalist to modern England, and to conduct him to church upon a Sunday morning. But Mimnermus is impenitent. He confesses that the preacher is right when he says that all earthly pleasures are fugitive.
Much of the healthy physical conditions may have remained into the Middle Ages or even later; it is strange to read, for example, in Edrisius, of the pitch and tar that were exported to all parts from the Bradano river, or of the torrential Sinno that "ships enter this river it offers excellent anchorage"; odd, too, to hear of coral fisheries as late as the seventeenth century at Rocella Ionica, where the waves now slumber on an even and sandy beach.
The whole poem is to be found in a book of poems known as "Ionica." The poem describes a fight between two ships, the French ship, Temeraire, and the English ship, Quebec.
It needs a peculiar lightness of hand to give grace to these colloquial numbers, and the author of Ionica is more at home in the dryad-haunted forest with Comatas. In combining classic sentiment with purely English landscape he is wonderfully happy.
By the way, it was Callimachus who wrote the epigram on the death of Heraclitus which was made immortal by the translation of the author of "Ionica." It is, I hold, the best poetic translation in the English tongue. Of the distinguished people with whom my father was personally acquainted in his earlier days, among the most memorable were Carlyle and Edward Irving.
Twenty years after the publication of Ionica, and when that little book had become famous among the elect, the author printed at Cambridge a second part, without a title-page, and without punctuation, one of the most eccentric looking pamphlets I ever saw. The enthusiastic amateur will probably regard his collection incomplete without Ionica II., but he must be prepared for a disappointment.
In his book of verses Ionica he made graceful play with a casual word which Charles Wood had let fall in the ecstasy of swimming "Oh, how I wish I could fly!" Surely no teacher ever uttered a more beautiful eulogy on a favourite pupil; and happily the poet lived long enough to see his prophecy fulfilled.
There is perhaps no modern book of verse in which a certain melancholy phase of ancient thought is better reproduced than in Ionica, and this gives its slight verses their lasting charm. We have had numerous resuscitations of ancient manners and landscape in modern poetry since the days of Keats and André Chenier.
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