Rise? Yes, with the myriads of the just,
After short sleep, my dust!
Life of immortal fire
Thine from the Almighty Sire!
Alleluia!
Sown, to upspring, O joy! in richer bloom,
The Lord of harvest's tomb
Gives forth his sheaves within——
Us, even us, who died in him!
Alleluia!
O victory! O dayspring's kindling ray!
God's everlasting day!
In the grave's solemn night.
Slumbering, soon shall thy light
Wake me to sight.
As if of visionary dream the end——
With Jesus to ascend
Through joy's celestial door——
Pilgrims of earth no more——
Our sorrows o'er.
My Saviour, to the Holiest leading on;
That we may at the throne,
In sanctuary free.
Worship eternally!
Alleluia!
F. W. P.
Original
AUBREY DE VERE.
[Footnote 20]
[Footnote 20: Search after Proserpine, and other Poems. London, 1843.
Poems. by Aubrey de Vere. London, 1855.
The Sisters, Inisfail, and other Poems. London, 1861
May Carols. New York: Lawrence Kehoe, 1866.]
Out of the greater breadth and catholicity, so to speak, of our present literary taste, it results that one class of poets is arising among as which has been very rare before our day: those in whom the soul is the predominant force—men who care nothing for popularity, and barely enough for recognition by their peers to make them publish at all—men by nature high-strung and shy, yet tranquil, balanced, and strong; who write, in short, from the spiritual side of things. These could not, in ordinary times, hope for a wide, general favor, and they sailed the nautiluses of literature; dropping from the surface of themselves, equally native to the cooler, deeper waters below. But so strong have been the gales of awakening love of reading, that even these stranger ships, not bound for the ports of popularity, find wind enough to waft them wherever refinement and scholarship care to deal in their rare and choice cargoes.
An extreme of this class is Aubrey de Vere. Naturally not a poet of the people, and still further isolated by holding and eloquently celebrating a faith which incurs certain ostracism from the literature of sectarian bigotry, he is almost unknown in America. Fresh from his works, we are almost at a loss to understand how, in a country not only of so many Catholic leaders, but where there is so much pretension to literary taste, he can be such a stranger. All the usual and more accessible sources are so barren of his biography that we cannot trust ourselves to attempt any sketch of his life. From materials so meagre and of such indifferent authenticity, nothing satisfactory—nothing vivified—can be gathered; and biography that fails in personality is a body without a soul. So we content ourselves with the poet as we see him in his works.
In attempting an analysis of the qualities displayed in these volumes, we find, to begin with, none of the inequalities of those writers who begin quite young, and whose works go comet-like through after years, the youthful nebulosity tailing off from the maturer nucleus, in a long string of promising but not much performing versicles. There is none of the crudeness of journey work, but everywhere thought and gravity. The latter quality indeed is conspicuous. De Vere can be too sarcastic for us to deny him wit, but humor seems to be unknown to him. There is not the ghost of a joke in all his pages. We call this remarkable, because he treats of so very many things. In Thomson's Seasons (even waiving Thomson's nationality) or Paradise Lost—in any one poem—we may not expect humor; but in a miscellany, where every side of a man's mind usually displays itself, it seems odd not to find a trace of sense of the ludicrous. Certainly there is variety enough for it. The range of subjects is perhaps not very great, but the individual poems exhibit almost every shade of style, beginning on the hither side of quaintness and bringing up on the boundaries of the colloquial. [{74}] An artificial style like that of the Idyls of the King, or the Emersonian dialect ("virtute ac vitiis sapientia crescat"), our author never attempts; his thoughts, as a rule, seem to choose their own channel. He is willing enough to spend pains in making a thought clear, but such grave, antique costuming of ideas he takes no time for. The manner is always kept well in subordination to the matter of what he has to say.