The Poems of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu #232259

When in the year 1880 I wrote a memoir of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, as a Preface to his "Purcell Papers," published by Bentley and Son, I was not aware that, besides being the author of the Irish poems contained in that collection of Irish stories and of the celebrated "Shamus O'Brien," Le Fanu had anonymously contributed half-a-dozen other poems to the Dublin University Magazine between the years 1863 and 1866; two of which, "The Legend of the Glaive," and "Beatrice," exhibit Le Fanu's genius in a new and unexpected light. They show him to have been capable of dramatic and lyrical creation on a distinctly higher plane than he had hitherto reached, although the forms in which the drama and the legend are cast are clearly experimental and not always successful.