"In the spring of 1846 I gladly took leave forever of discount ledgers and current accounts, and went to Belfast for two months' instruction in the duties of Principal Coast Officer of Customs; a tolerably well-sounding title, but which carried with it a salary of but £80 a year. I trudged daily about the docks and timber-yards, learning to measure logs, piles of planks, and, more troublesome, ships for tonnage; indoors, part of the time practiced customs book-keeping, and talked to the clerks about literature and poetry in a way that excited some astonishment, but on the whole, as I found at parting, a certain degree of curiosity and respect. I preached Tennyson to them. My spare time was mostly spent in reading and haunting booksellers' shops where, I venture to say, I laid out a good deal more than most people, in proportion to my income, and managed to get glimpses of many books which I could not afford or did not care to buy. I enjoyed my new position, on the whole, without analysis, as a great improvement on the bank; and for the rest, my inner mind was brimful of love and poetry, and usually all external things appeared trivial save in their relation to it."
Of Allingham's early song-writing, his friend Arthur Hughes says:--
"Rossetti, and I think Allingham himself, told me, in the early days of our acquaintance, how in remote Ballyshannon, where he was a clerk in the Customs, in evening walks he would hear the Irish girls at their cottage doors singing old ballads, which he would pick up. If they were broken or incomplete, he would add to them or finish them; if they were improper he would refine them. He could not get them sung till he got the Dublin Catnach of that day to print them, on long strips of blue paper, like old songs, and if about the sea, with the old rough woodcut of a ship on the top. He either gave them away or they were sold in the neighborhood. Then, in his evening walks, he had at last the pleasure of hearing some of his own ballads sung at the cottage doors by the blooming lasses, who were quite unaware that it was the author who was passing by."
In 1850 Allingham published a small volume of lyrics whose freshness and delicacy seemed to announce a new singer, and four years later his 'Day and Night Songs' strengthened this impression. Stationed as revenue officer in various parts of England, he wrote much verse, and published also the 'The Rambles of Patricius Walker,' a collection of essays upon his walks through England; 'Lawrence Bloomfield in Ireland,' the tale of a young landlord's efforts to improve the condition of his tenantry; an anthology, 'Nightingale Valley' (1862), and an excellent collection of English ballads, 'The Ballad Book' (1865).
In 1870 he gladly embraced an opportunity to leave the Customs for the position of assistant editor of Fraser's Magazine under Froude, whom he afterward succeeded as editor. He was now a member of a brilliant literary circle, knew Tennyson, Ruskin, and Carlyle, and was admitted into the warm friendship of the Pre-Raphaelites. But in no way does he reflect the Pre-Raphaelite spirit by which he was surrounded; nor does he write his lyrics in the metres and rhythms of mediaeval France. He is as oblivious of rondeaux, ballades, and roundels, as he is of fair damosels with cygnet necks and full pomegranate lips. He is a child of nature, whose verse is free from all artificial inspiration or expression, and seems to flow easily, clearly, and tenderly from his pen. Some of it errs in being too fanciful. In the Flower-Songs, indeed, he sometimes becomes trivial in his comparison of each English poet to a special flower; but his poetry is usually sincere with an undercurrent of pathos, as in 'The Ruined Chapel,' 'The Winter Pear,' and the 'Song.' For lightness of touch and aerial grace, 'The Bubble' will bear comparison with any verse of its own genre. 'Robin Redbreast' has many delightful lines; and in 'The Fairies' one is taken into the realm of Celtic folklore, which is Allingham's inheritance, where the Brownies, the Pixies, and the Leprechauns trip over the dew-spangled meadows, or dance on the yellow sands, and then vanish away in fantastic mists. Quite different is 'Lovely Mary Donnelly,' which is a sample of the popular songs that made him a favorite in his own country.
After his death at Hampstead in 1889, his body was cremated according to his wish, when these lines of his own were read:--
"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."
By the shore, a plot of ground