This remarkable poet, who has so strangely lapsed from public remembrance, was in his own day greatly admired by his fellow-poets and the most discerning critics of the period. Mrs Browning, and Robert Browning still more, were deeply impressed by what is now his best known production—Sylvia: a Lyrical Drama (1836); and Alfred Tennyson was so struck by the quality of the young poet’s work that he volunteered to defray the cost of publishing his verse. Lord Tennyson frequently, in conversation, alluded to George Darley as one of the “hopelessly misapprehended men”; and we have Robert Browning’s own authority, says Darley’s latest biographer, Mr John H. Ingram, for stating that Sylvia did much to determine the form of his own early dramas. Sylvia, again, charmed Coleridge; and in 1836, Miss Mitford, whom Mr Ingram calls a leading spirit among the literati of her day, writes:—“I have just had a present of a most exquisite poem, which old Mr Carey (the translator of Dante and Pindar) thinks more highly of than any poem of the present day—‘Sylvia, or The May Queen,’ by George Darley. It is exquisite—something between the ‘Faithful Shepherdess’ and the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’”

Darley was the eldest child of Arthur Darley, of the Scalp, County Wicklow. The poet, however, was not born there, but in Dublin, in the year 1795. While he was a child, his parents emigrated to the United States; and the boy spent the first ten years of his life at the family home in Wicklow. In due time, and subsequent to the return of his parents from America, he went through the usual scholastic routine, though he did not graduate at Trinity College, Dublin, till his twenty-fifth year—a delay in great part due to what, then and later, he considered a disastrous impediment of speech. From the loss of a scholarship to the social deprivations he underwent in London, this infirmity, he declared, was his evil fortune. His first book, The Errors of Ecstasie, was published (1822) in London, where he had settled. Needless to say, as this volume consists mainly of a dialogue between a Mystic and the Moon, the reading public remained in absolute ignorance of the new poet. His second book (1826) consisted of a series of prose tales and verses, collectively entitled—The Labours of Idleness; or, Seven Nights’ Entertainments—set forth as by “Guy Penseval.” Three years later appeared his chief work, Sylvia. Notwithstanding its divers shortcomings, some of them frankly acknowledged by the author himself, Sylvia is a creation of genuine imagination, and possesses a haunting and quite distinctive charm. Both the merits and demerits of his too often uncontrolled style are adequately indicated in the criticism of Mr Ingram: “[frequently] his wild Celtic fancy breaks its curb and carries him into clouds of metaphor as marvellous as they are musical, although often the flight ends by a hasty and undignified descent to commonplace earth.” There is no commonplace, however, in his exquisite faëry verse, which, in the words of the same critic, “is among the loveliest in the language; at times is even sweeter than Drayton’s, and is as fantastic as Shakespeare’s own.”

For ten years the poet kept silence; but in 1839 he issued his fragmentary and extraordinary Nepenthe—a poem which, with all its brilliant quality and daring richness of imagery, might well be taken as an example of the Celtic genius in extremis—so unreservedly does he give way to an uncontrolled imagination. Perhaps the best thing said about Nepenthe is in a letter from the author himself, wherein he writes:—“Does it not speak a heat of brain mentally Bacchic?”

Nothing that Darley published afterwards enhanced his reputation. Lovers of his best work, however, should read the posthumous volume of his “Poems” edited by R. and M. J. Livingstone—a rare volume, as it was printed for private circulation. It contains some of the songs from an unpublished lyrical drama called The Sea Bride; and it is from this that the “Dirge,” quoted at page 104 in this book, comes. In this posthumous collection also is included the following striking and characteristic lyric:—

THE FALLEN STAR.

A star is gone! a star is gone!
There is a blank in Heaven,
One of the cherub choir has done
His airy course this even.
He sat upon the orb of fire
That hung for ages there,
And lent his music to the choir
That haunts the nightly air.
But when his thousand years are passed,
With a cherubic sigh
He vanished with his car at last,
For even cherubs die!
Hear how his angel brothers mourn—
The minstrels of the spheres—
Each chiming sadly in his turn
And dropping splendid tears.
The planetary sisters all
Join in the fatal song,
And weep this hapless brother’s fall
Who sang with them so long.
But deepest of the choral band
The Lunar Spirit sings,
And with a bass-according hand
Sweeps all her sullen strings.
From the deep chambers of the dome
Where sleepless Uriel lies,
His rude harmonic thunders come
Mingled with mighty sighs.
The thousand car-borne cherubim,
The wandering eleven,
All join to chant the dirge of him
Who fell just now from Heaven.

After a life of great intellectual activity, but of singular isolation and of misanthropic unhappiness, George Darley died in London on the 23rd of November 1846, in his fifty-first year. For further information as to the personality and writings of this strange, undeservedly neglected, but unbalanced man of genius, the reader may be referred to the delightful edition of Sylvia, with Introduction, by Mr John H. Ingram, published by Mr J. M. Dent (1892).

AUBREY DE VERE.
[PAGE 105-6]

Mr Aubrey De Vere is one of the most scholarly poets of Ireland. All his work is informed with a high and serious spirit; and though the bulk of it is not distinctively Celtic, either in sentiment or utterance, not even distinctively Irish, he has written some poems which are as dear to Nationalists and Celticists as is almost any other verse by contemporary poets. Mr Aubrey De Vere is the younger brother of Sir Stephen De Vere, Bart. (the translator of Horace, and himself a poet of distinction), and son of Aubrey De Vere, the poet friend of Wordsworth. He was born in 1814, and has lived most of his life, with long intervals in London and in several parts of Europe, at his birthplace, Curragh Chase, Adare, Co. Limerick. Among his most noteworthy writings are:—The Waldensees (1842); The Search after Proserpine (1843); Poems (1853); The Sisters (1861); The Infant Bridal: and other Poems (1864); Irish Odes (1869); The Legends of St Patrick (1872); Alexander the Great, a poetical drama (1874); and another drama, St Thomas of Canterbury (1876); Antar and Zara: and other Poems (1877); Legends of the Saxon Saints (1879); and The Foray of Queen Meave, based upon an ancient Irish epic (1882). Since then Mr Aubrey De Vere has published a Selection of his poems and one or two books of a religious nature. His best prose work is to be found in his Essays chiefly on Poetry (1887), and Essays chiefly Literary and Ethical (1889).

FRANCIS FAHY.
[PAGE 107]