Chapter IV: Magnetic Influences (3)

Another effect of this over-philosophic temperament, while equally hurtful to his popularity, greatly endears him to the few. It is the pure and elevated tone of all he writes. In this quality he is eminent. He is a mountaineer on the steeps of Parnassus, whose game by instinct never flies to the plains. He lifts ordinary subjects into a seeming of unreality. Things seem to lose outline and glide away from the grasp; as clouds that have form enough when seen from the earth, are shapeless vapor to the aeronaut among them. So, again, the interest fails in comparison with a lower grade of thought. People will buy very indifferent sketches, but care very little for the most accurate bird's-eye view. There is a singular charm in this unlabored, if not unconscious loftiness; but the mass of readers weary, as they do of a lecture on astronomy, from over-tension of unused faculties. What is the difference to a reader whether an author passes beyond his reach by going apart into abstruseness or soaring away into idealism?

We have shown before how the versification suffers. Everywhere reason clogs the wings of rhyme. Our author is for ever putting his Pegasus in harness to the car of some truth or other. A warm human sympathizer, a deep and poetical worshipper, a burning and noble protestant against the woes and wrongs of Ireland, with scholarship, reading, talent, every auspicious omen, he has never fulfilled, and may never fulfil, the promise that is in him. {76} His reason is for ever making clear to his better angels of fancy and feeling the exact boundaries of just thought, which they may not overstep. It robs his philanthropy of human tenderness, his religion of ardor, his patriotism of enthusiasm. His is the calm, trained strength of perfect mental soundness; the fiery contractile thrills, that make of the impassioned man a giant for one grand effort, he seems to do battle with and slay before they can grow into acts. What a combination of qualities goes to the making of a great poet!

The poems now before us range themselves mainly into three grand classes--sonnets, religions poems, and lyrics, etc., on Ireland. There are some noteworthy exceptions, however--as, for example, the excellent poems on Shelley and Coleridge, whom he thoroughly appreciates, the widely known stanzas called The AEolian Harp, and the splendid lines on Delphi--one of his very best efforts. But our purpose lies rather with the poet, as revealed through his works, than with the poems themselves. So we must leave a wide, unnoted margin of miscellaneous pieces, where any reader whom we may succeed in interesting in the beauties of our author may range unprejudiced by our expressions of opinion, and confine ourselves to our true subject--the poet himself, viewed successively in the three great pathways he has opened for himself. We only pause to advise our reader that we make no pretensions to gathering the harvest, but leave golden swathes behind instead of ordinary gleaning.

Sonnets seem to require a peculiar talent. Almost all our best men have written them, and almost all badly, while the small newspaper and periodical craft strand on them daily. Only our deepest and most refined thinkers have written really good ones, and to succeed in them at all, is to join a very limited coterie, where Shakespeare and Milton have but few compeers. When, then, we say that De Vere is the author of some of the best we have in our literature, we justify high expectation.

He is one of the most voluminous of sonnet writers. There are in the books between one hundred and fifty and two hundred. It seems to be his favorite outlet for those briefer, choicer reflections that lose their charm by being amplified for the vulgar comprehension,

". . . . As orient essences, diffuse
On all the liberal airs of low Cashmere,
Waft their rich faintness far to stolid hinds,
To whom the rose is but a thorny weed;"

but which, after all, are the trifles that make up the inner life of a soul, and for whose waste, as our author himself says,

"Nature, trifled with, not loved,
Will be at last avenged."

It may well be imagined that this is a path peculiarly adapted to our author's contemplative yet versatile mind. He is singularly fitted for this style of composition, which does not demand the least particle of that kind of spirit and impulsive animation in which he is wanting; and accordingly he has written a number of sonnets which will, we think, compare with the very best for eloquence and just thought. Walter Savage Landor--_non sordidus auctor_--deliberately pronounced the one on Sunrise the finest in the language.

Two others, by which he is probably best known to American readers, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, one written March, 1860, the other, June 12, 1861, addressed to Charles Eliot Norton, the editor of the North American Review. Both relate to the national struggle, and indicate a somewhat lively interest in our affairs, but otherwise are not remarkable. Much better than these we find the following. It is a good sample besides of the author's general style:

"Silence and sleep, and midnight's softest gloom,
Consoling friends of fast declining years,
Benign assuagers of unfruitful tears,
Soft-footed heralds of the wished-four tomb!
Go to your master, Death--the monarch whom
Ye serve, whose majesty your grace endears.
And in the awful hollows of his ears
Murmur, oh! ever murmur: 'Come, O come!'
Virginal rights have I observed full long,
And all observance worthy of a bride.
Then wherefore, Death, dost thou to me is wrong,
So long estranged to linger from my side?
Am I not thine? Oh! breathe upon my eyes
A gentle answer, Death, from thine elysian skies!"

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It is no easy thing to be publicly and yet gracefully sad. Do not we mentally associate an idea of weakness or effeminacy with melancholic writings? Yet here is--we feel it at once--the true sadness we all respect: the unaffected weariness which does not cry out its grief, but sighs because it suffers and is strong.

It is not often that De Vere leaves the lofty pinnacles of thought or the pleasant hills of fancy for sterner fields, but here for once he swoops from his eyrie into the following scathing lines. They are the last of five very spirited sonnets on Colonization, each of which is worth quoting, did but our space permit:

"England, magnanimous art thou in name;
Magnanimous in nature once thou wert;
But that which ofttimes lags behind desert,
And crowns the dead, as oft survives it--fame.
Can she whose hand a merchant's pen makes tame,
Or sneer of nameless scribe--can she whose heart
In camp or senate still is at the mart,
A nation's toils, a nation's honors claim?
Thy shield of old torn Poland twice and thrice
Invoked; thy help as vainly Ireland asks,
Pointing with stark, lean linger from the West--
Of western cliffs plague-stricken, from the West--
Gray-haired though young. When heat is sucked from ice,
Then shall a Firm discharge a national task."

This speaks for itself. It sums up the faults of the English nation better in a dozen lines than a congress of vaporers about British tyranny or essayists on _perfide Albion_ could do in a month of mouthings. There is not a weak line or phrase in it, or one that is not auxiliary to the general effect intended. This, in short, is what we call masterly.

There are a score of other sonnets that we would wish to quote in illustration of the refined thought and elegant delicacy of diction which characterize them all; but we are constrained to content ourselves with one also noticed by Landor for its singular felicity and beauty. It is from his first book, page 268:

"Flowers I would bring. If flowers could make thee fairer.
And make, if the muse were dear to thee;
(For loving these would make thee love the bearer.)
But sweetest songs forget their melody,
And loveliest flowers would but conceal the wearer:
A rose I marked, and might have plucked; but she
Blushed as she bent, imploring me to spare her,
Nor spoil her beauty by such rivalry.
Alas! and with what gifts shall I pursue thee.
What offerings bring, what treasures lay before thee;
When earth with all her floral train doth woo thee,
And all old poets and old books adore thee;
And love to thee is naught; from passionate mood
Secured by joy's complacent plenitude?"

This poem is remarkable to us as containing one of the few recognitions we have ever seen of that beauty which rises above the province of passion, and strikes a dim awe into admiration. They are not many who can feel it, and few, indeed, who have expressed it. The same thought occurs in another passage referred to by Landor:

"Men loved; but hope they deemed to be
A sweet impossibility."

But we have a further reason for preferring this to several equally fine. It is to note what may be another of De Vere's unconscious adaptations. The well-known scholar, Henry of Huntington, addressed to Queen Adelicia of Louvaine some lines which hinge upon the very same turn of thought. The real excellence of the verses emboldens us to subjoin a few of them, that the reader may observe the resemblance:

"Anglorum regina, tuos, Adeliza, decores
Ipsa rcferre parans Musa stupore riget.
Quid diadema tibi, pulcherrima? quid tibi gemma?
Pallet gemma tibi, nec diadema nitet.
Ornamenta cave; nec quicquam luminis inde
Accipis; illa nitent lumine clara tuo . . . ."

We are not sure but the mediaeval poet, having no further idea beyond mere laudation, has rather the better of the complimenting. But then praise to a queen would be flattery to a subject.

Without trying the rather dubious policy of attempting to prove our taste, we think that upon these sonnets alone we could rest De Vere's claim to be a first-class sonnet writer. If it were not a received impossibility, we should be tempted to call him the equal in this respect of Shakespeare. Of course we admit the impossibility.

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Leaving the sonnets, we come to a far more interesting portion of the works before us--the religious poems. As a Christian, our author is indeed admirable. He evinces not only a deep, strong, real, and realizing faith, but much fruitful thought over the mental details, so to speak, and a wonderful comprehension of the theory, theology, and mysteries of the church.

More properly than religious poems, we should speak of poems on religion; for the man's whole life is a religious poem. Scarcely a scrap is not full of his deep Catholicity. Of verses specially and professedly devotional, these volumes contain few, besides the May Carols, save some Poems on Sacred Subjects, which we find below the author's average. Some of them carry abstractness to the verge of vagary. What color of pretence, for instance, has a man for printing (if he _must_ write it), and deliberately inviting the public to read, a copy of verses on the Unity of Abstract Truth? We internally know we are not Wordsworths, but it is very unpleasant to have it made so plain. In shrewd anticipation of any mental queries, we utterly decline saying whether we have read the lines or not. We cannot determine which would be the more to our credit.

But we pass by unnumbered beauties to reach our author's best and most memorable work--May Carols. This is noble alike in design, tone, and execution. The plan is simple--to produce a series of poems in honor of the Blessed Virgin, graduating poetical expositions of her relations to faith according to the progress of her month of May. It is just the topic for him, and the result is the most beautiful development of the entire subject that can be imagined. We have no words for the subtlety and success with which the individualities of Mary and Jesus are wrought out. The man who, without seeking adventitious aid by startling and shocking the habits of Christian thought and Christian reverence, can so draw a portrait of the Saviour, has in this alone deserved the thanks of the ages as a standard-bearer on the march of the hosts of God. These great delineations form the first and main function of the whole work. We cannot set forth his purpose more lucidly than in his own words, as we find them in the preface:

"The wisdom of the church, which consecrates the fleeting seasons of
time to the interests of eternity, has dedicated the month of May
(the birth-day festival, as it were, of creation) to her who was
ever destined in the divine counsels to become the Mother of her
Creator. It belongs to her, of course, as she is the representative
of the incarnation, and its practical exponent to a world but too
apt to forget what it professes to hold. The following poems,
written in her honor, are an attempt to set forth, though but in
mere outline, each of them some of the great ideas or essential
principles embodied in that all-embracing mystery. On a topic so
comprehensive, converse statements, at one time illustrating highest
excellence compatible with mere creaturely existence, at another,
the infinite distance between the chief of earthly creatures and the
Creator, may seem, at first sight, and to some eyes, contradictory,
although in reality mutually correlative. On an attentive perusal,
however, that harmony which exists among the many portions of a
single mastering truth can hardly fail to appear, and with it the
scope and aim of this poem."

This certainly is aiming high. Not only does the poet include in his plan the moral delineation of her whom the church holds the highest type of created humanity; he scales the heavens themselves. But our author is impious Enceladus crushed beneath his own presumption, but a Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord, and rising to the infinite sky in beatific visions. Perhaps we best realize the boldness of the enterprise when we think for how many centuries the praise of the Mother and Son has exhausted thought and imagination of the greatest souls. He is a daring gleaner who follows the fathers of the church over their chosen fields. Yet the May {79} Carols are a sheaf from the same golden foison where Augustine and Aquinas and Chrysostom led the reapers. How fruitful must be the soil!

We have never seen anything to compare with the picture of the Holy Child here presented, unless it be the picture of the Holy Mother. We cannot, in our allotted space, render all the admirable gradations and delicate shadings, but must cull with difficult choice one or two only. One of the first is the

MATER CHRISTI

Daily beneath his mother's eyes
Her lamb maturity his lowliness:
'Twas hers the lovely sacrifice
With fillet and with flower to dress.

Beside his little cross he knelt,
With human-heavenly lips he prayed;
_His will with in her will she felt,
And yet his will her will obeyed_. . . .

He willed to lack; he willed to bear;
He willed by suffering to be schooled;
He willed the chains of flesh to wear;
Yet from her arms the world he ruled.

_As tapers 'mid the noontide glow
With merged yet separate radiance burn_,
With human taste and touch, even so,
The things he knew he willed to learn.

He sat beside the lowly door:
His _homeless_ eyes appeared to trace
In evening skies remembered lore,
And shadows of his Father's face.

One only knew him. She alone
Who nightly to his cradle crept.
And _lying like the moonbeam prone
Worshipped her Maker as he slept_.

Whoever can read that without admiring it, is a clod: whoever can read it without having his whole idea of Christ's childhood intensely vivified and expanded, must be a St. John or an angel. How beautiful, and, when we look at it, how bold is the epithet "homeless!" How exactly it embodies the longing of his spirit out of its human prison toward the freedom of the heavens! Yet how daringly true to imagine the omnipresent Deity homeless! Again, how acutely the last scene characterizes the tender timidity of Mary's mother-love, and how natural and intensely human the conscious, sweet self-deception which brought her to worship when only the humanity slept, and she seemed separated from her Son and alone with her Creator! But the simile of the taper is perhaps the best touch of all, as being the masterly expression of one of the most subtle and difficult conceptions of the human mind. It must divide the honors of comparison with the concluding lines of the

MATER SALVATORIS.

O heart with his in just accord!
O soul his echo, tone for tone!
O spirit that heard, and kept his word!
O countenance moulded like his own!

Behold, she seemed on earth to dwell;
But, hid in light, alone she sat
Beneath the throne ineffable,
Chanting her clear magnificat.

Fed from the boundless heart of God,
The Joy within her rose more high.
And all her being overflowed,
Until the awful hour was nigh.

Then, then there crept her spirit o'er
The shadow of that pain world-wide,
Whereof her Son the substance bore;--
Him offering, half in him she died.

_Standing like that strange moon, whereon
The mask of earth lies dim and dead,
An orb of glory, shadow-strewn,
Yet girdled with a luminous thread_.

For originality, and perfect expression of an idea by an image, we know of nothing better in all our range of poetry than those two similes. That last is especially wonderful for its reconditeness. Who would ever think of an annular eclipse of the moon as an illustration of religion? And yet how marvellously well it does illustrate! The first verse of the poem is very poor and strained in its rhythm, and the second not much better in its mysticism, which is rather adapted to the enthusiasm of the middle ages; but the end counterbalances all.

Having thus digressed to the Blessed Virgin, we go on to note in how many lights these poems display her. The idea of her they present is, to an ordinary idea, as the flashing, many-faceted jewel to the rough gem of the mines. Here, for example, the whole poetry of motherhood is pressed into her service in a few dense lines:

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O Mother-Maid! to none save thee
Belongs in full a parent's name:
So faithful thy virginity,
Thy motherhood so pure from blame!

All other parents, what are they?
Thy types. In them thou stood'st rehearsed,
(As they in bird, and bud, and spray).
Thine Antitype? The Eternal First!

Prime Parent He: and next Him thou!
Overshadowed by the Father's Might,
Thy 'Fiat' was thy bridal vow;
Thine offspring He, the "Light of Light."

Her Son Thou wert: her Son Thou art,
O Christ! Her substance fed Thy growth:--
She shaped Thee in her virgin heart,
Thy Mother and Thy Father both!

Let us pass on from this, without breaking the continuity, to

CONSERVABAT IN CORDE.

As every change of April sky
Is imaged in a placid brook,
Her meditative memory
Mirrored His every deed and look.

As suns through summer ether rolled
Mature each growth the spring has wrought,
_So Love's strong day-star turned to gold
Her harvests of quiescent thought_.

_Her soul was as a vase, and shone
Translucent to an inner ray;
Her Maker's finger wrote thereon
A mystic Bible new each day_.

Deep Heart! In all His sevenfold might
The Paraclete with thee abode;
And, sacramented there in light,
Bore witness of the things of God.

The last verse has a flaw rare in these volumes--a mixture of metaphors. In the first two lines, "heart" is strongly personified, and clearly represents Mary herself. In the third with no intimation whatever, and without a break in the construction of the sentence, the same heart is become a place, and is indicated by "there." We cannot imagine how the author, with his susceptible taste, read it over in the proof-sheets without feeling the jar of the phrases.

So much for the loving side of Mary's character. In depicting her suffering, the poet has even excelled this. The first broad stroke of his picture is

MATER DOLOROSA

She stood: she sank not. Slowly fell
Adown the Cross the atoning blood.
In agony ineffable
She offered still His own to God.

No pang of His her bosom spared;
She felt in Him its several power.
But she in heart His Priesthood shared:
She offered Sacrifice that hour. . . .

Beautifully our author hag named the succeeding poem also Mater Dolorosa. The one is the agony of loss, the other the bitterness of bereavement:

From her He passed: yet still with her
The endless thought of Him found rest;
A sad but sacred branch of myrrh
_For ever folded in her breast_.

A Boreal winter void of light--
So seemed her widowed days forlorn:
_She slept; but in her breast all night
Her heart lay waking till the morn_.

Sad flowers on Calvary that grew;--
Sad fruits that ripened from the Cross;--
These were the only joys she knew:
Yet all but these she counted loss.

Love strong as Death! She lived through thee
That mystic life whose every breath
_From Life's low harp-string amorously
Draws out the sweetened name of Death_.

Love stronger far than Death or Life!
Thy martyrdom was o'er at last
Her eyelids drooped; and without strife
To Him she loved her spirit passed.

For once we can leave the of a poem to the unaided italics with a good grace. To expound the exquisiteness of these lines would be like botanically dissecting a lily. But there is a deeper underlying excellence that may perhaps not suggest itself so irresistibly--the marvellous intuitive delicacy of the whole conception embodied by this poem. Only a truly profound religious feeling could thus happily have characterized the effect of such a sorrow on such a nature. A mere pietist would have painted a sanctified apathy; a merely smart writer would have imbued her with an eagerness for the end of earthly trouble; a man of talent would have made her resigned to death; the man of genius makes her resigned _to life_. Here is the effortless exactness of true poet.

Two more views, and we can turn from this picture of the Blessed Virgin of the May Carols--one, her human and inferior relation to God; and the other, her human and superior relation to ourselves. To the first point, perhaps the most explicit of the poems is the following, which, also, is a good example of the author s peculiar, sudden manner of turning his broad philosophy into the channel of some forcible application:

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Not all thy purity, although
The whitest moon that ever lit
The peaks of Lebanonian snow
Shone dusk and dim compared with it;--

Not that great love of thine, whose beams
Transcended in their virtuous heat
Those suns which melt the ice-bound streams,
And make earth's pulses newly beat:--

It was not these that from the sky
Drew down to thee the Eternal Word:
He looked on thy humility;
He knew thee, "Handmaid of thy Lord."

Let no one claim with thee a part;
Let no one, Mary, name thy name,
While, aping God, upon his heart
Pride sits, a demon robed in flame.

Proud Vices, die! Where Sin has place
Be Sin's familiar self-disgust.
Proud Virtues, doubly die; that Grace
At last may burgeon from your dust.

But the poem which of all most truly, tenderly, and perfectly develops the whole beautiful spiritual dependence of the true Catholic upon the Mother of his God, is the Mater Divinae Gratis, already published in The Catholic World for May, p. 216.

The beauty of this piece has already attracted wide attention. The wonder is that any Catholic could have passed it by. It is a theological treatise in itself. Could all the repositories of divinity furnish a more complete reputation of those cold and narrow organisms (we hesitate to call them hearts) whose breasts would seem to have room for just so much piety, of a prescribed quality and regulation pattern, and who insist that every one we love is a unit in the divisor which assigns to each his portion of that known and limited store, our affection? These people sincerely cannot see how one can love Mary too without loving God less. It is as if a tree could not strike another root without sapping its trunk. Perish this narrowness! How long before these strait-laced souls--the moral progeny of that unhappiest of men, Calvin--will learn to love God as well as believe in him?

There is something very difficult of analysis about the power of these poems. They have none of that dramatic force which consists in skilfully selecting and emphasizing the striking sonnets of the situation. De Vere's strength does not seem to tend toward the outward personality, but rather lies in the direction of the soul and its sensations. When we lay down the May Carols, we do not conceive a whit the more clearly how the Virgin Mary looked; there is no impression to overlie and mar our memories of the great painters' pictures of her. But we cannot read aright without bearing away an expanded comprehension and near, real, vivid insight into her love, her pain, her humility, her deserving, her glory. We so enter in spirit into the scenes of her life as absolutely to lose sight of the surroundings. This kind of power may not be the most broadly effective, but we must admit that it reaches our admiration through our best faculties. Its secret lies in the fact that the author's own ideas both of Christ and his Mother are so complete and exalted. At what advantage, for example, he stands over the author of Ecce Homo, who, it seems, would have us believe Christ in his childhood to have been a Hebrew boy, much like other Hebrew boys, till ill-explained causes metamorphosed a Galilean peasant youth into the most transcendent genius of history! With this cold casuistic theory compare De Vere's picture of the mother lying worshipping by the moonlit cradle of her Son and God. He accepts in their entirety the received ideas of the church, neither varying nor wishing to vary one jot or tittle of the law, but lovingly investing it with all the developments of thought and all the decorations of fancy. No Catholic can help being struck by the singular doctrinal accuracy which pervades without perturbing the whole of this work. The result is a portraiture of the incarnation and the Blessed Virgin, such as an author who could set all the ruggedness of Calvary before our eyes, and make every waving olive-leaf in Gethsemane musically mournful in our souls, could not hope to rival by all the efforts of graphic genius.

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But scarcely less remarkable is the success in the other grand aim of the May Carols--what he himself calls "an attempt at a Christian rendering of external nature." His attempt has brought forth a series of purely descriptive pieces, interspersed at intervals, intended to present the symbolism which the aspect of May's successive phases might offer to the imagination of faith. To cultivate Christianity in the shifting soil of fancy is of itself a bold endeavor; but when the method proposed is by picturing the delicate and evanescent shades of spring's advance, the difficulty can be realized.

How far the author succeeds in this most subtle undertaking of educing the symbolism of May, we must leave to country criticism for final adjudication. We have our opinion; we can discover many sweet emblems; but we cannot analyze or reason out our thoughts satisfactorily. We recognize portraits in the May-gallery, but are not familiar enough with nature's costumes to judge of the historical order. We can exult with the earth in the gladness of the season; we are permeated in a measure, as are all, with the influences of the bluer skies, the softer breezes, the more confident advance of the flowers. But when it comes to reading the succession of the changing clouds, harmonizing the melody of the gales, deciphering the hieroglyphics that spring's myriad fingers write in verdure on the woods and meadows, we feel that ours is but a city acquaintance with May. We have rested too well content with the beauty to think of its moral suggestiveness or significance.

But this we do know, that the author has struck such a vein of descriptive felicity that, according to Dr. Holmes's witty logic, he can afford to write no more description till he dies. There are touches of this here and there in other places, but nothing to promise such little gems of landscape as stud the May Carols. There is an accession of naturalness and a flow of happy phrases as soon as he reaches one of these themes, that is like swimming out of fresh water into salt. Take for instance, this:

When April's sudden sunset cold
Through boughs half-clothed with watery sheen
Bursts on the high, new-cowslipped wold,
And bathes a world half gold half green,

_Then shakes the illuminated air_
With din of birds; the vales far down
Grow phosphorescent here and there;
Forth flash the turrets of the town;

Along the sky thin vapors scud;
_Bright zephyrs curl the choral main;_
The wild ebullience of the blood
Rings joy-bells in the heart and brain:

Yet in that music discords mix;
The unbalanced lights like meteors play;
And, tired of splendors that perplex,
The dazzled spirit sighs for May.

It is a great disadvantage to these beautiful little poems to be thus taken from their frames, thereby losing their emblematic and retaining only their intrinsic beauty. But even so, there are two more which we fearlessly present on the merit of their own unaided charms. Here is the first:

Brow-bound with myrtle and with gold,
Spring, sacred now from blasts and blights,
Lifts in a firm, untrembling hold
Her chalice of fulfilled delights.

Confirmed around her queenly lip
The smile late wavering, on she moves;
And seems through deepening tides to step
Of steadier joys and larger loves.

The stony Ash itself _relents,
Into the blue embrace of May
Sinking, like old impenitents
Heart-touched at last;_ and, far away,

_The long wave yearns along the coast_
With sob suppressed, like that which thrills
(While o'er the altar mounts the Host)
Some chapel on the Irish hills.

We scarcely know which to admire most, the precise, clear-cut elegance of the opening personification, the beauty of the third verse, or the melody (how the first line matches the sense!) and admirable comparison in the last one. Only, if the poet had ever waded among the waves of bloom of our western prairies, he would have found a better expression than the awkward one of "deepening tides," which is out of character with the rest.

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But the last one we give is the finest. We had put it in the first rank ourselves before finding that it had also struck the fine ear of Mr. Landor. It is a Claude Lorraine done into verse:

Pleasant the swarm about the bough;
The meadow-whisper round the woods;
And for their coolness pleasant now
The murmur of the falling floods.

Pleasant beneath the thorn to lie,
And let a summer fancy loose;
To hear the cuckoo's double cry;
To make the noon-tide sloth's excuse.

Panting, but pleased, the cattle stand
Knee-deep in water-weed and sedge,
And scarcely crop the greener band
Of osiers round the river's edge.

But hark! Far off the south wind sweeps
The golden-foliaged groves among,
Renewed or lulled, with rests and leaps--
Ah! how it makes the spirit long

To drop its earthly weight, and drift
Like yon white cloud, on pinions free,
Beyond that mountain's purple rift,
And o'er that scintillating sea!

We do not think we can say anything that will add to this.

There are two very noticeable faults of detail in the May Carols. One is the great occasional looseness of rhyme. We are no lover even of the so-called rhymes to the eye--words ending, but not pronounced alike--but when there is no similarity of sound at all, we emphatically demur. Here are some, taken at random, of the numberless false rhymes which disfigure these poems: "Hills--swells;" "height--infinite;" "best--least" (these last two in one short piece of sixteen lines); "buds--multitudes;" "repose--coos;" "flower--more;" "pierce--universe," etc. Now such as these are utterly indefensible. The different sounds of the same vowel are as different among themselves as from any other sounds, and there is no sense in taking advantage of the accident that they are represented by the same letter to cheat the ear and plead the poverty of the alphabet. In a man who labored for words, we could condone a roughness here and there; but in a writer of De Vere's fluency there is no excuse for such gross carelessness.

We observe also at intervals a kind of baldness of expression--a ruggedness and disregard of beauty in uttering ideas--that is unpleasant. We think, with a learned friend who first drew our attention to it, that this comes of the authors anxiety and determination to be clear. The lines seem like men trained down to fighting-weight--all strength and no contour. No doubt the high and difficult ideas to be rendered (for it is never seen in the descriptive interludes) constitute ample cause for this fault; but yet, in noticing the whole, we are constrained to note it as a blemish.

It remains to speak of the author's poems on Ireland. Here it is evident that he feels warmly as the chief organizer himself; and yet nothing can be further from to-day's Fenianism than the tone of his writings. Irish they are to the core--as animated as the best in proclaiming the wrongs of Ireland and the misrule of the invaders--but from the same premises somehow he seems to draw a different conclusion. This is to our author one of those near and dear subjects which are elements in a man's inner life: he has published another volume [Footnote 21] upon it, and a large portion of his poems turn on it. Most of the best among his single poems--The Irish Celt to the Irish Norman, the Ode to Ireland, the beautiful Year of Sorrow, and others--are either too long or too close-woven for quotation. Another able one is The Sisters, which is full of beautiful thoughts, independent of the Irish bearing.

[Footnote 21: English Misrule and Irish Misdeeds. London, 1848.]

But the most prominent and elaborate of these poems is Inisfail, or Ireland in the Olden Time--a chronological series of odes, songs, and all manner of remarks in rhyme, illustrative of Ireland's history and the feeling of her people, through the various epochs of her national and denationalized life. There is more historical research, more talent, and more time buried to waste in this poem, than would make ten ordinary shallow reputations. The author shows a thorough and a _vitalized_ knowledge of Irish history, and he penetrates well and nobly the {84} succession of popular sentiment; nay, he has done a more difficult thing still--he has caught much of the spirit of bardic verse. Only our very decided and deliberate opinion is, that the spirit of bardic verse is extremely like the gorilla--very hard to catch, and not particularly beautiful when caught. We have read, we are fairly sure, the better part of the English-Irish poetry that has attained any note--that class of which Clarence Mangan stands at the head, and are very much grieved and dissatisfied with it. Wherever the Gaelic ode-form is adopted, or the Gaelic symbolism--the Roisin Dhu, Silk of the Kine, etc.--we cannot help wishing it absent. Whatever has pleased us in poems of this sort would have pleased as well or better in another guise; whatever has fatigued or offended, has generally done so on account of its Gaelic form. From weary experience, we have reached the firm conclusion that the Gaelic style is peculiarly adapted to the Erse tongue, and we earnestly hope that future twangings of the harp that hung in Tara's halls may be either in the aforesaid dialect, or else, like Moore's Irish Melodies (and does any one wish for anything more nobly Irish?), consonant in style with the spirit of the language they are written in. The best talent devoted to grafting Gaelic blossoms on English stems has only served to show them essentially uncongenial. Every attempt of this kind reads like a translation from Erse into English, and, like all translations, hints in every turn of the superiority of the original. And, speaking disinterestedly (we are, as it happens, neither Gael nor Sassenach), we scarcely think any translator likely to swim in waters where Clarence Mangan barely floated.

Thus we admire much of Inisfail for the wonderful adaptiveness which revivifies for us the dead feelings of dead generations, while at the same time we cannot thoroughly like nor enjoy it. There is great artistic taste throughout, but the poetical merit, as indeed might be expected, Appears to us to be greatest in the delineations from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century--neither too far nor too near in point of time. The outlawry times elicit some fine lines: in fact, violation of law seems always to bring our author out at his best. Of the earlier poems, perhaps the best are The Malison and The Faithful Norman. These are of the first, or pure Irish period. The next, or Irish-Norman epoch, is full of the best and the worst of our author's verse. Of The Bard Ethell we have spoken before. The Bier that Conquered is a striking poem, as are also the quaint, rambling, suggestive lines called The Wedding of the Clans. Amid several long, fierce, and highly Gaelic exultations over battles, chiefs, and things in general, we find a noble poem. The Bishop of Ross, which we really regret we cannot quote here. Just before it, however, is one of the best which we may have space for:

KING CHARLES'S "GRACES."

A.D. 1626

"Thus babble the strong ones, 'The chain is slackened!
Ye can turn half round on your sides to sleep!
With the thunderbolt still your isle is blackened,
But it hurls no bolt upon tower or steep.
We are slaves in name! Old laws proscribed you;
But the king is kindly, the Queen is fair.
They are knaves or fools who would goad or bribe you
A legal freedom to claim. Beware!'

II.

"We answer and thus: Our country's honor
To us is dear as our country's life!
That stigma the bad law casts upon her
Is the brand on the fame of a blameless wife
Once more we answer: From honor never
Can safety long time be found apart;
The bondsman that vows not his bond to sever,
Is a slave by right, and a slave in heart!"

There is the true ring about this--strength and spirit both. Close by it is another--the only one of the odes we like--The Suppression of the Faith in Ulster, which is of the same calibre.

The last book (there are three) is full of beauty as the style grows modern. But we have cited so much that is beautiful, that we prefer quoting one of the few but forcible instances where our most Christian poet gives vent to his very considerable powers of sarcasm:

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GOOD-HEARTED.

"The young lord betrayed an orphan maid--
The young lord soft-natured and easy:
The man was 'good-hearted,' the neighbors said;
Flung meat to his dogs; to the poor flung bread.
His father stood laughing when Drogheda bled;
He hated a conscience queasy!

II.

"A widow met him, dark trees o'erhead,
Her child and the man just parted--
When home she walked her knife it was red;
Swiftly she walked, and muttered, and said,
'The blood rushed fast from a fount full-fed!
Ay, the young lord was right "good-hearted!"'

III.

"When morning wan its first beam shed.
It fell on a corpse yet wanner;
The great-hearted dogs the young lord had fed
Watched, one at the feet and one at the head--
But their months with a blood-pool hard by were red;
They loved--in the young lord's manner."

There is something about the fierce bitterness here that strongly reminds one of Tennyson's poem of The Sisters, with its weird line--

"Oh! the Earl was fair to see!"

From several of very nearly the same purport, we select the following, influenced to choose it, as we own, by the wonderful flow of its measure, as well as its truly Irish beauty. There is a kind of peculiar richness of diction that no other nation on earth ever attains. Every reader of Tom Moore will know what we mean, and recognize a kindred spirit in

SEMPER RADEM

"The moon, freshly risen from the bosom of ocean,
Hangs o'er it suspended, all mournful yet bright;
And a yellow sea-circle with yearning emotion
Swells up as to meet it, _and clings to its light_.
The orb, unabiding, grows whiter, mounts higher;
_The pathos of darkness descends on the brine_--
O Erin! the North drew its light from thy pyre;
Thy light woke the nations; the embers were thine.

II.

"'Tis sunrise! The mountains flash forth, and, new-reddened,
The billows grow lustrous so lately forlorn;
From the orient with vapors long darkened and deadened.
_The trumpets of Godhead are pealing the morn:_
He rises, the sun, in his might reascending;
_Like an altar beneath him lies blazing the sea!_
O Erin! who proved thee returns to thee, blending
The future and past in one garland for thee!"

But what we regard as really the finest poem in Inisfail is an apparent, perhaps a real, exception to our rule above stated, that whatever of this poetry pleases us would please as well if divested of its Gaelic form. The charm of this lies in its being so essentially Irish in conception. It is just such an original, bold, wild inspiration as no other body than an Irish clan could without incongruity be made to feel. There is more intense _Irishness_ (what other word will express it?) in it than in all the poems--ay, and half the poets--of this century. We give it with the author's own explanation prefixed:

THE PHANTOM FUNERAL.

"James Fitz-Garret, son of the great Earl of Desmond, had been sent
to England, when a child, as a hostage, and was for seventeen years
kept a prisoner in the Tower, and educated in the Queen's religion.
James Fitz-Thomas, the 'Sugane Earl,' having meantime assumed the
title and prerogatives of Earl of Desmond, the Queen sent her
captive to Ireland, attended by persons devoted to her, and provided
with a _conditional_ patent for his restoration .... As the young
earl walked to church, it was with difficulty that a guard of
English soldiers could keep a path open for him. From street and
window and housetop every voice urged him to fidelity to his
ancestral faith. The youth, who did not even understand the language
in which he was adjured, went on to the Queen's church, as it was
called; and with loud cries his clan rushed away and abandoned his
standard for ever. Shortly afterward he returned to England, where,
within a few months, he died.

Strew the bed and strew the bier
(Who rests upon it was never man)
With all that a little child holds dear,
With violets blue and violets wan.

Strew the bed and strew the bier
With the berries that redden thy shores, Corann;
His lip was the berry, his skin was clear
As the waxen blossom--he ne'er was man.

Far off he sleeps, yet we mourn him here;
Their tale was a falsehood; he ne'er was man!
'Tis a phantom funeral! Strew the bier
With white lilies brushed by the floating swan.

They lie who say that the false queen caught him
A child asleep on the mountains wide;
A captive reared him, a strange faith taught him;--
'Twas for no strange faith that his father died!

They lie who say that the child returned
A man unmanned to his towers of pride;
That his people with curses the false Earl spurned:
Woe, woe, Kilmallock! they lie, and lied!

The clan was wroth at an ill report.
But now the thunder-cloud melts in tears.
The child that was motherless played. "'Twas sport."
A child must sport in his childish years!

Ululah! Ululah! Low, sing low!
The women of Desmond loved well that child!
Our lamb was lost in the winter snow;
Long years we sought him in wood and wild.

How many a babe of Fitzgerald's blood
In hut was fostered though born in hall!
The old stock burgeoned the fair new bud,
The old land welcomed them, each and all!

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Glynn weeps to-day by the Shannon's tide,
And Shanid and she that frowns o'er Deal;
There is woe by the Laune and the Carra's side,
And where the knight dwells by the woody Feale.

In Dingle and Beara they chant his dirge:
Far off he faded--our child--sing low!
We have made him a bed by the ocean's surge,
We have made him a bier on the mountain's brow.

The clan was bereft! the old walls they left;
With cries they rushed to the mountains drear.
But now great sorrow their heart has cleft;--
See, one by one they are drawing near!

Ululah! Ululah! Low, sing low!
The flakes fall fast on the little bier;--
The yew-branch and eagle-plume over them throw!
The last of the Desmond chiefs lies here."

We close, far from completing our sketch of the poet. We have not exhausted the volumes before us, and they do not exhaust their author. De Vere has written several other books, mostly of early date--from 1843 to 1850--which one must read to know him entirely. But we are very sure that those who will read the books from which we have drawn our illustrations will read all. There are few authors who grow so upon the reader. Somehow the force and beauty of the thoughts do not impress at first. We think the rationale of the process is that we mostly begin by reading three parts of sound to one of sense. After the melody comes the harmony; gradually, on after-reading, the glitter of the words ceases to dazzle, and then, if ever, we commune mind to mind with the author. This is as rare with modern readers as a hand-to hand bayonet fight in modern battles. Now Aubrey de Vere writes a great deal of thought so very quietly, that we miss the cackling which even talent nowadays is apt to indulge in on laying any supposed golden eggs of wisdom. Hence we have some singular opinions about him. One finds him cold and impassible; another votes him a sort of gentlemanly Fenian visionary, while a third devotes a column of one of our best hypercritical periodicals to viewing him as a mere love-poet. These are all windfall opinions, which had been better ripening on the tree. The grace, the rhythm, and, above all, the stern ascendency of truthful exactness over inaccurate felicities of expression, strike one constantly more and more. We have ourselves passed through these phases of opinion, besides several others; but every day fortifies our final conviction. It is, that Aubrey de Vere is one of those true poets whom the few love well; who will always have admirers, never popularity; and who must wait for his full fame until that distant but coming day when blind, deep movements of unity shall thrill the sects of Christendom, and bigotry no longer veil from the gifted and appreciative the merits of the first Catholic poet of to-day.

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From The Lamp.

UNCONVICTED; OR, OLD THORNELEY'S HEIRS.