Till death shall reverence woman's race! In her,
Though doubly-dower'd, a mother and a queen,
There lived a soft, perpetual maidenhood,
An inexperienced trust, timid, yet frank,
Shy, yet through guilelessness forgetting shyness.
She seem'd a flower-like creature come to fruit;
She moved among her babes an elder sister;
Then, wakened by an infant cry or laugh,
Full motherhood returned.”
Some qualities of Mr. de Vere's work, which are more generally known than the virile force displayed in his grasp of the characters of his play, are shown at their best in the two or three lyrics which occur in it. Let us end an inadequate notice, which may send our readers to the poem itself, by quoting his exquisite paraphrase of one of the most beautiful of the Psalms: