Page:A Memorial of John Boyle O'Reilly from the City of Boston.djvu/47

Rh in our moral antecedents which the American historian might well learn from him to appreciate.

As a literary man, I should speak of his literature, he showed his strength, on the one side, in that, and on another side, his fineness and his tenderness. In his poetry, the metre that came most congenial to him is that which might be called almost emphatically the Irish metre—the long, swinging measure of the magnificent ballad of "Fontenoy," the metre that makes superb the series of glorious pictures in Sir Samuel Ferguson's "Forging of the Anchor." That metre he handled, and he gave a new strength to it. But it was not his only side.

And I remember hearing him once, and some of my fellow-members of the Papyrus Club here on the platform will recall his reading to us once, on one of the ladies' nights celebrated by that literary club, a poem of five verses, called "Love's Secret,"—verses so exquisite in tone, touching with such pathetic poetry the very heart and core of the deepest tie that binds man to woman, that there is many a poet of America and England, whose verses fill the newspapers and magazines, who might well give all his fame if the authorship of these five verses could be transferred to him.

That was the combination that gave the charm to Boyle O'Reilly.