outcast of God and man. The cry of the wind, the moan of the sea, the sobs of women forsaken and alone, the silence of hopeless hearts waiting the return of those who will return no more, sweep the harp cords like the ghosts of forgotten things. The formless passion of poor Clarence Mangan's visions, the visions of a broken genius who from the pit abysmal, 'The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns,'

'Had tears for all souls in trouble

Here and in hell.'

in 'Inisfail' takes articulate shape, retaining Mangan's stormlike beauty of colour and imagery:

'O who art thou with that queenly brow
And uncrowned head?

And why is the vest that binds thy breast,
O'er the heart blood-red?

The babes I fed at my foot lay dead;
I saw them die:

In Ramah a blast went wailing past,
It was Rachel's cry.

But I stand sublime on the shores of Time,
And I pour my ode

As Miriam sang to the cymbals' clang,
On the wind to God.'

And round that solitary figure, Little Black Rose, Silk of the Kine-or by whatever name she is called-voices wail, winds surge, rushes shiver, the dawns rise grey as dusk, and the sea-waves clamour, and the songs of the poet are one with the song of the land. It is not the poetry of culture, it is not the poetry of art, but it is the poetry of emotional appeal. To the Teuton his Fatherland, to the Latin his Motherland. The Celt knows nothing of these domestic affections. To him his country ever has been and remains the Loveland, loved with all the passion, with all the extravagance, faithlessness, the instability and caprice, of the first loves of all lovers.

There have been younger Celtic poets who, with the overtinge of self-consciousness which detracts from the charm of their spontaneity, have embodied, as de Vere has not, the imaginative phases of the Irish genius. Mr. Yeats' little fantasy of May Eve, 'The Land of Heart's 'Desire,' with its extreme delicacy of touch and suggestion, is an instance in point; other instances occur amongst

De iuni in many Yours de irres, are - sms through

ENCIA DE stess is over27 Erwin the tints meid juning righ mists. Elevent, he has not the 13867. wi jurgie, o gold, the TIL spectre mirarents of De stoet irans off the newer Jer vine is poems lose JE I PALIEess freedom, in 2 Dress of an arrow int momplicated from the nos soi arrows of men who do WE CARRY in the souls from FJERasses, who guard their CRAS VIN passion's material realities els is in the beautiful love-lyric.

Tax
Insal me rasin falls on le Vere as a poet of
Verse again, except in the forlorn
me Years of Famine, and in some
A 20 Š. Plank Legends, Ed he revert to any
A Chenes A Rotiments Estinctively marked by

race-feeling. Three volumes of essays, two dramas, and three volumes of poems descriptive and narrative, some collections of miscellaneous lyrics, secular and religious, with sonnets and odes, make the sum total of the last editions of his works. * A love-poet-with an unsuccessful exception, Antar and 'Zara' he did not profess himself: he had not graduated in that college, and love as a central theme seems to have held no attraction for his pen. Nor was he, in one sense, a poet of creative imagination; with him imagination fertilised but did not sow the seed. Nor most emphatically of all was he, in later works, a poet of any emotion kin, howsoever far off, to passion either of the brain or sense. His thoughts as years went by ran in tranquil, clear currents, shadowed here and there by true pathos, illuminated by a spirit of delight and joy, reaching to what he himself named rapture, in things lovely and things sacred. And in sun or shade those currents ran with always the same equable translucid quietude, the same unvexed, unperturbed, flow. The lyrics where he excelled were those in which grace and tenderness supplied the deficit of strength and passion. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in acknowledging, in 1864, a gift of de Vere's collected poems, specified amongst his own favourites from of old.... "The Dignity of 'Sorrow," an example of that rare combination, good English and good verse,' and further deplored the absence of "a short song, "When I was young I said to Sorrow," which 'I do not think it derogatory to the poet to regard as perhaps his masterpiece.' No one will be inclined to dispute the judgement to whom this poem is known.

'When I was young I said to Sorrow,
"Come and I will play with thee "-
He is near me now all day;

And at night returns to say,

"I will come again to-morrow,

I will come and stay with thee."'

So runs one stanza, and, so far as exquisite versification and grace of rhythmical effect may be considered the dominant aim of verse where both combined produce a sense of sound in harmony with the sense of sentiment, few lyrics can surpass it. Neither of the two lyrics of

*These editions contain many reprints from former works, from 'The Waldenses,' a dramatic poem (withdrawn from print), from 'Inisfail' &c., with corrections and emendations, additions, and omissions.

sorrow most frequently on de Vere's lips, Keats' sorrowsong from Endymion,' taken in any of its stanzas

'Come then, Sorrow,

Sweetest Sorrow,

Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast:

I thought to leave thee,

And deceive thee,

But now of all the world I love thee best '—

or Shelley's Stanzas written in Dejection,' arrives at a greater harmony-more, a unison-of sound and sentiment. All these poems, poems of varying phases of sadness, are poems of acquiescent grief, expressed in tones soft as those of a slumber song, with all the languid syllables belonging to cradles where hope is hushed to its long sleep. De Vere's is the lightest note undoubtedly, but not less complete for its lightness. Others of his songs have a kindred charm.

‹ A sigh in the morning grey,
And a solitary tear,

Slow to gather, slow to fall,
And a painful flush of shame
At the naming of your name—
This is little, this is all,
False one, which remains to say

That thy love of old was here;
That thy love has passed away.'

By virtue of this it might well have chanced to de Vere to be numbered amongst that company of singers: Waller, with his Go, lovely Rose,' Carew, with Ask me no more,' Withers, with Shall I wasting in despair,' who live in popular fame on the merits of one single lyric.

Many of de Vere's stanzas are so slightly wrought that their extreme delicacy passes unnoticed as gossamer strung on violet beds. Such are the lines: 'Give me back my 'heart, fair child,' 'You drop a tear for those that die,' the little poems entitled 'A Sketch' and A Character,'

'Made up of Instincts half, half Appetites,
Ingenuous, winning, graceful, graceless, gay,
Her winged fancies, whensoe'er they stray,
Find, yield, or make, a thousand strange delights;
Then ranging swift as sound or lunar sprites,
For ever they desert but ne'er betray:
To please was what they promised; not to stay.'

Landor's cameo :

"The grateful heart for all things blesses,

Not only joy but grief endears.
I love you for your few caresses,

I love you for my many tears,'

is not chiselled with a more skilful hand than de Vere's

quatrain:

'Smiles are the wrinkles of our youth

Ab, gently turn the page;

And say,

that wrinkles are in sooth

But smiles of our old age.'

Or, to give another brief example:

'For me no roseate garlands twine,

But wear them, dearest, in my stead;
Time has a whiter hand than thine,

And lays it on my head.'

It may fill the readers of Alexander the Great' and 'St. Thomas of Canterbury,' of the May Carols,' and the Medieval Records,' with regret, that de Vere was not content to sing oftener of the lesser loves, the ephemeral affections with their hopes and disappointments, of common men. But to be a poet of sympathy and sentiment was not his final aim, and in his longer and more consecutive dramatic efforts, sentiment is mainly incidental, a passing episode or an unaccentuated circumstance, set amongst graver preoccupations of the soul's progress or the intellectual and moral activities of an Alexander or an A'Becket. And although the two song-paraphrases of the Psalms, sung by Jew captives in Alexander the Great,' are in themselves a feat of genius:

'We sat beside the Babylonian river,

Within the conqueror's bound weeping we sate,
We hung our harps upon the trees that quiver
Above the onrushing waters desolate.'

And the briefer song:

'Behold He giveth His beloved sleep,

And they shall waken in a land of rest:

Behold he leadeth Israel like a sheep;

His pasture is the mountain of the Blest,'

it is not in these dramas that to hazard a verdict-the higher poetical levels of his later years are to be sought.