n the year of his death by a posthumous volume entitled _Songs of a
Worker_. Of these the _Lays of France_ are merely paraphrases of Marie:
great part of the _Songs of a Worker_ is occupied with mere translation
of modern French verses--poor work for a poet at all times. But _The
Epic of Women_ and _Music and Moonlight_ contain stuff which it is not
extravagant to call extraordinary.

It was never widely popular, for O'Shaughnessy pushed the fancy of the
Prae-Raphaelites for a dreamy remoteness to its very furthest, and the
charge (usually an uncritical one, but usually also explaining with a
certain justice a poet's unpopularity) of "lack of human interest" was
brought against him. Sometimes, too, either of deliberate conviction or
through corrupt following of others, he indulged in expressions of
opinion about matters on which the poet is not called upon to express
any, in a manner which was always unnecessary and sometimes offensive.
But judged as a poet he has the _unum necessarium_, the individual note
of song. Like Keats, he was not quite individual--there are echoes,
especially of Edgar Poe, in him. But the genuine and authentic
contribution is sufficient, and is of the most unmistakable kind. In the
first book "Exile," "A Neglected Heart," "Bisclavaret," "The Fountain of
Tears," "Barcarolle," make a new mixture of the fair and strange in
meaning, a new valuation of the eternal possibilities of language in
sound. _Music and Moonlight_--O'Shaughnessy was one of the few poets who
have been devoted to music--is almost more remote, and even less
popularly beautiful; but the opening "Ode," some of the lyrics in the
title poem (such as "Once in a hundred years"), the song "Has summer
come without the rose," and not a few others, renew for those who can
receive it the strange attraction, the attraction most happily hinted by
the very title of this book itself, which O'Shaughnessy could exercise.
That there was not a little that is morbid in him--as perhaps in the
school generally--sane criticism cannot deny. But though it is as unwise
as it is unsafe to prefer morbidness for itself or to give it too great
way, there are undoubted charms in it, and O'Shaughnessy could give
poetical form to these as few others could. Two of his own lines--

Oh! exquisite malady of the soul,
How hast thou marred me--

put the thing well. Those who have once tasted his poetry return, and
probably, though they are never likely to b