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the North, flickered faintly, fitfully, in the green West, flickered, paled, flickered again, and was extinct.

True there are hints of some undercurrents of the soul's revolt from the intrusion of new deities. Oiseen, the Blind Bard, is but half converted, despite baptism and Patrick. '... One day, while his beads he told,

Fierce thoughts, a rebel breed,

Burst up from old graves in the warrior's heart,
And he stormed at priest and creed.

'PATRICK. High feast thou hast on the festal days,
And cakes on the days of fast.

OISEEN. Thou liest, thou priest, for in wrath and scorn
Thy cakes to the dogs I cast.

PATRICK. Old man, thou hearest our Christian hymns,
Such strains thou hast never heard.

OISEEN. Thou liest, old priest, for in Letter-Lee wood
I have listened its famed blackbird!

Twelve hounds had my sire, with throats like bells,
Loud echoed on lake and bay;

By this hand they lacked but the baptism rite
To chaunt with thy monks this day.'.

But Oiseen, for all his ragings against monkhood, forgiveness of wrong, and the dull truce-days of the peace of God, dies reconciled; wrath ebbs from his lips, his anger sinks to a wail; the old lion lies down at length, a lamb in the Shepherd's Fold. And Bard Ethel preserves better than Oiseen what de Vere names' the false conscience' of revenge.

'If any man slay me-not unaware,

By no chance blow, nor in wine and revel,
I have stored beforehand a curse in my prayer
For his kith and kindred; his deed is evil.'

In the Recollections' a kindred portrait is drawn from life. 'I remember seeing him,' de Vere writes of a chivalrous Irish gentleman of the past,' walk up and down our library, 'his long white hair streaming over his shoulders, and 'hearing him say, "It is a great thing to be able to look 'back on a long life and record, as I can, that never once did any man injure me but sooner or later I had my revenge.' And if the fierceness of human passions, of hearts uprooted from their old attachments, finds but this fainter echo in de Vere's verse, neither does he temper-according to the custom of many modern writers--the monotonies of holiness

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with mystic emotionalism. His nuns, his monks, are one and all-to pursue the metaphor of the spiritual marriage of the soul-men and women of happy wedded life; a certain divine and aureoled domesticity is their special prerogative of nature and of grace. They have nor part nor lot with those divine daughters of desire' Crawshaw sang with all the vehemence of his genius, daughters and sons of men whose passion celestial, knowing neither the assuagement of joy's possession nor the sharp chill of joy's disillusion, forever finding, seeks; for ever having, craves. 'I found and I sought Him, I had and I wanted Him.' 'I was seized with 'such great impetus of love . . . that it seemed my heart was breaking so sweet is this pain that no delight ' of life can exceed it in content . . . it is a love-passage 'which passes between the soul and God.' So run broken sentences of the Saint of the Flaming Heart—and of many another saint, whose passion has every amalgam of humanity, is stained with tears, rent with doubt and wounded with many wounds. Children these of the fire-de Vere's saints are children of the cool Dawn-star and the fresh-fallen Dew.

'The nearest to the Highest, that is love,'

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cries the girl-convert in King Eochaid,' and light-winged, soul after soul, of boy and girl, of youth and maid, of man and woman, rises in fearless gladness, in gay rejoicing, towards their Bridegroom Christ.

'Come Thou, that com'st. Our hope is this,

That the body might die and the soul set free
Swell out like an infant's lips to the kiss
Of the Lover who filleth infinity.'

As a question of art undoubtedly this avoidance of emotionalism, this elimination of all suggestion of the spiritual sensualities of mystic passion, as one element in religious romance-poetry, is a loss and a forfeiture. But the cool well-springs of the St. Patrick Legends have a value as of crystal, and a sweetness as of the lingering song-notes of the woodland birds de Vere commemorates in perhaps the most beautiful descriptive passage of all his works:

'As bower on bower

Let go the waning light, so bird on bird
Let go its song. Two songsters still remained,
Each feebler than a fountain soon to cease,
And claimed somewhere across the dusking dell

Rivals unseen in sleepy argument,

Each, the last word :-a pause, and then, once more,
An unexpected note :-a longer pause ;-

And then past hope, one other note, the last.'

And with the Legends and with 'Inisfail,' days to be and generations yet unborn may come to do fuller justice to the work of a great, if not of the greatest, poetic art.

As a poet it was, a poet by choice and profession, de Vere made his one and only claim to public recognition. It is with this in view that Mr. Ward's Memoir, in spite of its many merits, would seem to fall short of its mark. He has lost sight of the poet in the Catholic theologian, lost sight of the man in favour of the convert. To those who shared with de Vere sympathies and interests outside the pale of Catholicism, the detailed analysis of each phase of his religious beliefs would appear to convey an impression, not necessarily false, but one-sided. De Vere was by temperament a Christian, and by inclination of his reason a Catholic: and whatever regrets his conversion may have occasioned to his intellectual contemporaries, Sara Coleridge's letter to Henry Taylor may be taken as a fair key to the attitude of mind with which they regarded it, or, as years passed, came to regard it.

...

"Mr. de Vere's letter rather grieves me," she wrote (probably in 1851). "He seems so restlessly eager to justify his secession but this he cannot do without converting us to his new faith. We cannot, retaining our old one, think his views rightly founded . . . though we may hold him quite justified in going whither his convictions lead him. Yet I doubt not that the step he has taken will be the means of grace to him and will render him more unworldly or rather (for he never had a spark of worldliness in him) more and more solid and practically religious.""

With hardly an exception the change-or more accurately the developement of his religious views left no sore to rankle in his elder relationships of affection, while to a younger generation, de Vere's Catholicism appeared so entirely a part of his personality that to picture him without it would have seemed as unfamiliar as a portrayal of St. Francis without his cord and habit. Undoubtedly religion, and religious truth as he held it, lay nearer than any other interest to his heart. Moreover, as James Spedding describes Dr. Ward's affectionate endeavour to promote a growth of Mr. Huxley's little faith, it might be said of de Vere that he too was inclined to beg of his younger associates as a

personal favour to believe a little more.' But never was Catholic so unresentful of unsuccess in such gentle proselytism and never could non-responsive dissenters feel his sympathies narrowed or his affections blunted for the most recalcitrant. And his memory as friend, as companion, as poet, seems to demand a more varied and more comprehensive secular horizon than that accorded him even in the appreciative pages of Mr. Ward's careful, scholarly, and conscientious study of de Vere's life.

ART. III.—THE COLOUR QUESTION IN THE
UNITED STATES.

1. Negroes in the United States. Bureau of the Census, S. N. D. North, Director. Washington: Government Printing Office. 1904.

2. The Negro Problem. New York: Pott & Company. 1903. 3. Southern Thoughts for Northern Thinkers. By MRS. MURPHY. New York: Bandanna Publishing Company. 1904.

4. The South and the Negro.

An Address delivered at Birmingham, Ala., by the REV. BISHOP CHARLES B. GALLOWAY. New York: John F. Slater Fund. 1904. 5. The Work and Influence of Hampton. Proceedings of a Meeting held in New York City, Feb. 12, 1904. The Armstrong Association.

To appreciate properly the present position of the colour

question in the United States a brief reference must be made to statistics as well as to history. The census for 1900 puts us in possession of the necessary information as to numbers, trades, &c., of negroes and mulattoes, and as the work which stands first in our list is issued by the Department of Commerce and Labour, its information may be accepted as official and as absolutely free from all bias. The number of negroes in the continental United States is 8,840,789. In 1790 there were 689,784 negroes in the Republic. The importation of slaves ceased to be legal in 1810, and the census of that year gave the negro population at 1,377,808. In 1790 the centre of the negro population was in Virginia; it is now in North-Eastern Alabama. The district in which the proportion of negroes is greatest lies along both banks of the lower Mississippi, where fiveeighths of the population are negro, the maximum being in Issaquena county, Mississippi, with more than fifteen negroes to each white person. In the South, negroes are about onethird of the population, both in cities and in country districts. Between 1860 and 1900, Southern negroes increased 93.4 per cent. and Southern whites 134.9 per cent. Illiteracy among Southern negroes is more than four times that among Southern whites; but the percentage of illiteracy is lower among negroes born since the Civil War. There are nearly four million negroes in the United States engaged in gainful occupations. Negro breadwinners constitute

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