Judging from his poems, he must have found pleasure in his profession as well as pain.

There is a strange sadness nearly always, but this sadness is mixed with expressions of love for the educational establishment which he directed, and for the students whose minds he helped to form.

He must have been otherwise a very shy man.
Scarcely anything seems to be known about him after his departure from educational circles, although everybody of taste now knows his poems.

I wish to speak of them because I think that literary graduates of this university ought to be at least familiar with the name "Ionica." At all events you should know something about the man and about the best of his poems.

If you should ask why so little has yet been said about him in books on English literature, I would answer that in the first place he was a very small poet writing in the time of giants, having for competitors Tennyson, Browning and others.