But, waiving their final cause, three of the odes are good, the first two, and the seventh—the best of all—which, as also the ninth, is republished from the book of 1861. The close of this is singularly touching and true, and well worth recalling even to many who must have admired it before.
"I come, the breath of sighs to breathe,
Yet add not unto sighing;
To kneel on graves, yet drop no wreath
On those in darkness lying.
Sleep, chaste and true, a little while,
The Saviour's flock and Mary's,
And guard their reliques well, O Isle,
Thou chief of reliquaries!
"Blessed are they that claim no part
In this world's pomp and laughter:
Blessèd the pure; the meek of heart
Blest here; more blest hereafter.
'Blessed the mourners.' Earthly goods
Are woes, the master preaches:
Embrace thy sad beatitudes,
And recognize thy riches!
"And if, of every land the guest,
Thine exile back returning
Finds still one land unlike the rest,
Discrowned, disgraced, and mourning,
Give thanks! Thy flowers, to yonder skies
Transferred, pure airs are tasting;
And, stone by stone, thy temples rise
In regions everlasting."
"Sleep well, unsung by idle rhymes,
Ye sufferers late and lowly;
Ye saints and seers of earlier times,
Sleep well in cloisters holy!
Above your bed the bramble bends,
The yew tree and the alder:
Sleep well, O fathers and O friends!
And in your silence moulder!"
Scattered about between these odes we find a miscellany of minor pieces whose function seems to be that of interludes or thin partitions. Of these hors-d'oeuvres some are new, some old; the majority, for Mr. De Vere, commonplace. He cannot write a page without hitting on some happy phrase or just thought, but there is a little more than this to be said of almost all. The best is this sonnet which we do not remember having seen before:
"The Ecclesiastical Titles Act.
"The statesmen of this day I deem a tribe
That dwarf-like strut, a pageant on a stage
Theirs but in pomp and outward equipage.
Ruled inly by the herd, or hireling scribe.
They have this skill, the dreaded Power to bribe:
This courage, war upon the weak to wage:
To turn from self a Nation's ignorant rage:
To unstaunch old wounds with edict or with jibe.
Ireland! the unwise one saw thee in the dust,
Crowned with eclipse, and garmented with night,
And in his heart he said,'For her no day!'
But thou long since hadst placed in God thy trust,
And knew'st that in the under-world, all light,
Thy sun moved eastward. Watch! that East grows gray!"
We have also a long series of selections from the entire body of our author's published works. Here we are glad to welcome to America many of his best poems. The sonnets especially are as a rule well chosen. We miss many a lovely one, but we should miss these that are before us just as much. Mr. De Vere has also with excellent judgment honored with a place in this book his three charming idylls, "Glaucè," "Ione" and "Lycius"—among his very finest pieces of word-painting, and which have more of the old classic mode of expression than any modern poems in our language save Landor's, and perhaps Tennyson's "OEnone." We wonder, by the way, why a man who could write these idylls has never given us any classical translations. We are sure they would be remarkably good. The long poem of "The Sisters" is also reprinted in full. It is good, and we will not say that it is not a good piece here; but on reading it over, the discussion and description which frame the picture seem to us better than the picture itself. Indeed, we have begun to suspect more and more that Mr. De Vere's strength lies in his descriptive powers. It might surprise many other readers of his, as much as it did us, to examine for themselves and discover how many of their most admired passages are portraits. In mere verbal landscape-painting he stands very high. His very earliest books abound in felicities of this sort, and the May Carols are fairly replete with them, and in fact contain a whole little picture gallery in verse. And from the "Autumnal Ode—one of the very latest in his latest book [Footnote 59] —we select one of many passages which amply prove that Mr. De Vere's hand has not forgotten her cunning:
No more from full-leaved woods that music swells
Which in the summer filled the satiate ear:
A fostering sweetness still from bosky dells
Murmurs; but I can hear
A harsher sound when down, at intervals,
The dry leaf rattling falls.
Dark as those spots which herald swift disease,
The death-blot marks for death the leaf yet firm.
Beside the leaf down-trodden trails the worm.
In forest depths the haggard, whitening grass
Repines at youth departed. Half-stripped trees
Reveal, as one who says,'Thou too must pass,'
Plainlier each day their quaint anatomies.
Yon poplar grove is troubled! Bright and bold
Babbled his cold leaves in the July breeze
As though above our heads a runnel rolled.
His mirth is o'er; subdued by old October,
He counts his lessening wealth, and, sadly sober,
Tinkles his minute tablets of wan gold."
[Footnote 59: Dated in October, 1867.]
This is very vivid, and the closing fancy extremely graceful and pleasing. Poplars, by the way, seem to be a favorite theme of our author. Every one familiar with his poems will recall another beautiful description in his idyll of "Glaucè," in which occur these lines:
"How indolently
The tops of those pale poplars bend and sway
Over the violet-braided river brim."