A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists/Allingham, William
Allingham, William, Irish poet. B. Mar. 19, 1824. Ed. private schools in Ireland. At the age of fourteen he entered his father's bank, and in 1846 passed to the Irish Civil Service. His Poems (1850) and Day and Night Songs (1854) won him the friendship of Leigh Hunt, Rossetti, Tennyson, and other distinguished poets, and in 1863 he transferred to the English Customs. In 1865 he issued his chief volume of verse, Fifty Modern Poems. In 1870 he retired from the Civil Service and became sub-editor of Fraser's Magazine. He succeeded Froude as editor in 1874. His Diary (1907) is particularly interesting as a record of conversations (especially with Tennyson and Rossetti) which often turned on religion. He represents both himself and Tennyson as completely sceptical. "The secret [of man's condition and destiny] is kept from one and all of us," he says (p. 149); and he is disappointed "to find a great poet [Tennyson] with no better grounds of comfort than a common person " (p. 317). "I will have nothing to do with …… any form of Christianity," he says elsewhere; and, though he professed Theism, he maintained that " we cannot in the least describe, or comprehend, or even think Deity." He had, at his request, a secular funeral service, a friend reading his fine words:—
Body to purifying flame,
Soul to the Great Deep whence it came,
Leaving a song on earth below,
An urn of ashes white as snow.
D. Nov. 18, 1889.