"'But wheresoe'er thou wanderest, shape
Thy music ever to one Name;
Thou, too, clear stream, to cave and cape
Be sure to whisper of the same.
"'By every isle and bower of musk
Thy crystal clasps as on its curls;
We charge thee, breathe it to the dusk,
We charge thee, grave it in thy pearls.'
"The stream obeyed. That Name he bore
Far out above the moonlit tide.
The breeze obeyed; he breathed it o'er
The unforgetting pines, and died."
This is the very algebra of language, and all the terms employed are raised, as it were, to their highest powers. Such verse could proceed only from one of
"The visionary apprehensive souls
Whose finer insight no dim sense controls."
There is another poem by Mr. Aubrey de Vere, which deserves to be quoted for its ingenuity; nor can we, in reading it, but be reminded of what was said of Euripides, and might, with equal truth, be said of him: "In all his pieces there is the sweet human voice, the fluttering human heart." The Irish race in these verses is compared to a great religious order, of which England is the foundress:
"There is an order by a Northern sea,
Far in the west, of rule and life more strict
Than that which Basil reared in Galilee,
In Egypt Paul, in Umbria Benedict.
"Discalced it walks; a stony land of tombs,
A strange Petræa of late days, it treads.
Within its courts no high-tossed censer fumes;
The night-rain beats its cells, the wind its beds.
"Before its eyes no brass-bound, blazoned tome
Reflects the splendor of a lamp high hung;
Knowledge is banished from her earliest home
Like wealth: it whispers psalms that once it sung.
"It is not bound by the vow celibate,
Lest, through its ceasing, anguish too might cease;
In sorrow it brings forth, and death and fate
Watch at life's gate, and tithe the unripe increase.