SELECTIONS FROM AUBREY DE VERB.*

THIS little volume of selections from Aubrey de Vere, which is due to the refined taste and fastidious judgment of Mr.

Dennis, ought to make a poet who is comparatively little known amongst us, something like popular. There is beauty enough, variety enough, and vivacity enough in this volume of extracts, to endear the singularly spiritual serenity of Mr. de Vere's poetry to all who really master the poems it contains. The general conception of Mr. de Vere as a pious and meditative poet is a remarkably defective one. He is meditative, and his poetry is permeated by religious faith ; but these are not the characteristics which give to his poetry its chief interest and fascination. Mr. de Vere is a Words- worthian ; but while seldom even approaching the unique rapture of Wordsworth, he has much more dramatic insight than Words worth,—perhaps it would not be easy to have less, —much more historical feeling, much more capacity for con- tinuous poetic narrative. Let us take a specimen of Mr. Aubrey de Vere's least unique qualities first. The following sonnet is surely very happy and melodious,—penetrated, as it is, by a sad resignation, by a subdued and rather melancholy wisdom, which give great beauty to the warble of its lament :—

"Hini.e.N LIFE.

Sad is our youth, for it is ever going, Crumbling away beneath our very feet; Sad is our life, for onward it-is flowing, In current unperceived because so fleet; Sad are our hopes, for they were rich in sowing, But tares, self-sown, have overtopped the wheat; Sad are our joys, for they were sweet in blowing, And still, 0 still, their dying breath is sweet : And sweet is youth, although it bath bereft us Of that which made our childhood sweeter still ; And sweet our life's decline, for it bath left us A nearer Good to cure an older Ill ; And sweet are all things, when we learn to prize them

Not for their sake, but His who grants them or denies them."

That is a specimen of Mr. de Vere's slightest, though not his least melodious verse. More in his usual style, which is that of serene self-possession, or what Roman Catholics call "recollection," amidst the troubles and griefs of life, is the fine sonnet entitled "Sorrow: "—

" Count each affliction, whether light or grave,

God's messenger sent down to thee ; do thou With courtesy receive him; rise and bow ; And, ere his shadow pass thy threshold, crave Permission first his heavenly feet to lave ; 'Then lay before him all thou best: allow No cloud of passion to usurp thy brow, Or mar thy hospitality ; no wave Of mortal tumult to obliterate

The soul's marmoreal calmness : Grief should be,

Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate ; Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free ; Strong to consume small trc nbles ; to commend Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end."

That is a sonnet which no living poet but Mr. de Vere could have written. It has, what most of his poetry has, a certain

statuesque medimvalism of manner, mingled with the ease and clear self-consciousness of the nineteenth century. Often in reading his poetry, we seem to be listening to one of Giotto's frescoed saints who has come down from its Mantuan wall and has made itself at home amongst the eager and spasmodic interests of this age, without, however, catching either its im- patience or its sensationalism.

But this volume of selections from Mr. De Vere's verse contains specimens of poetry that is by no means pre- dominantly meditative, poetry that contains in it a full pulse of passion and strife. Read the extract from that fine Irish poem, "The Foray of Queen Meave," which Mr. Dennis has given under the title of "The Combat at the Ford," describing the four days' duel between Ferdia the Firbolg and Cuchullain, and the eventual victory of the latter. Here is a passage describing the third day's battle, the day on which the generous rivalry of the first two days passes into fierce and mortal anger :—

"Forlorn and sad

Peered the third morning o'er the vaporous woods, The wan grey river with its floating weed, And bubble nnirradiate. From the merge Cnchullain sadly marked the advancing foe :—

Alas, my brother 1 beamless is thine eye;

The radiance lives no longer on thy hair; And slow thy step.' The doomed one answered calm, Cuchullain, slow of foot, but strong of hand

• Aubrey de Vase's Poems, a Selection. Edited by John Dennis. London: Cassell and Co., Limited, 1890,

Fate drags his victim to the spot decreed : The choice to-day is mine : I choose the sword.'

So spake the Firbolg : and they closed in fight : And straightway from his heart to arm and hand Rushed up the strength of all that buried race By him so loved ! Once more it swelled his breast : Re-clothed in majesty each massive limb, And flashed in darksome light' of hair and eye Resplendent as of old. Surpassing deeds They wrought, while circled meteor-like their swords, Then fell like heaven's own bolt on shield or helm. Long hours they strove till morning's purer gleam Vanished in noon. Sharper that day their speech ; For, in the intenser present, years gone by Hung but like pallid, thin, horizon clouds O'er memory's loneliest limit. Evening sank Upon the dripping groves and shuddering flood With rainy waaings. Not as heretofore Their parting. Haughtily their mail they tossed Each to his followers. In the sell-same field That night their coursers grazed not ; neither sat Their charioteers beside the self-same fire : Nor sent they, each to other, healing herbs."

How fine, and how perfectly characteristic of Mr. de Vere, is that image in which he describes the fading away of the old friendly memories under the spell of the fierce strife :—

"Sharper that day their speech ; For in the intenser present, Years gone by Hung but like pallid, thin, horizon clouds O'er memory's loneliest limit."

That passage alone would mark Mr. de Vere a poet of no common order.

Again, as a poem of stately warning and true spiritual vision, take the "Ode to Ireland—against False Freedom," written in 1860, an ode which warned his countrymen of the approach of the very perils by which they have since been encompassed, and, indeed, engulfed. We cannot find space for the whole of this fine poem, but will take the verses which contain the eloquent passion of the close :—

The future sleeps in night : but thou 0 Island of the branded brow, Her flatteries scorn who reared by Seine Fraternity's ensanguined reign And for a sceptre twice abhorred Twice welcomed the Cnsarian sword !

Thy past, thy hope, are thine alone ! Though crushed around thee and o'erthrown The majesty of civil might The hierarchy of social right Firm state in thee for ever hold !

Religion was their life and mould.

The vulgar, dog-like eye can see Only the ignobler traits in thee; Quaint follies of a fleeting time ; Dark reliques of the oppressor's crime. The Seer—What sees he 7 What the West Hath seldom save in thee possessed; The childlike Faith ; the Will like fate, And that Theistic Instinct great New worlds that summons from the abyss The balance to redress of this.'

Wait thou the end; and spurn the while False Freedom's meretricious smile !

Stoop not thy front to anticipate Faith's triumph certain ! Watch and wait t The schismatic, by blood akin To Socialist and Jacobin, Will claim, when shift the scales of power,

His natural place. Be thine that hour

With good his evil to requite; To save him in his own despite ; And backward scare the brood of night !"

Mr. Dennis has, we think, done well to give his readers passages showing what Mr. de Vere could achieve in what we may call the intellectual dramarthe drama which shows rather the meditative play of great characters and great aims, than their actual collision, with the characters and the aims of others. Alexander the Great would probably never succeed upon the stage,—certainly not in such an age as ours. But it will be read as long as English literature survives, being, we think, superior in fire and genius to any of Browning's dramas, noble as many of them are, and quite on a level with Sir Henry Taylor's Philip Van Artevelde. We regret that Mr. Dennis's limits rendered it impossible to quote from Mr. de Vere's play on St. Thomas it Becket, a subject hardly so fascina- ting as his Alexander the Great, but not less impressively worked out ; but the extracts from Alexander the Great are quite sufficient to show Mr. de Vere's mastery in this school of poetry. Years ago we quoted in these columns the following magnificent ideal of Alexander ; but as it is quite certain that very few, if any, of our readers will El

remember the review in question, and that those who do, if there be any such, will enjoy reading this splendid passage again, we will repeat the conversation between Parmenio and his son, in which the younger man asserts the insanity of Alexander, and gives the evidence which he finds in the ex- pression of the King's eye, while the old Macedonian statesman corrects his son's hastier judgment :—

" Phi. One-half his victories come but of his blindness, And noting not the hindrance.

Par. At Granicus- But that was chance. At Issus he was greater : I set small store on Egypt or on Tyre : Nest came Arbela. Half a million foes Melted like snow. To him Epaminondas Was as the wingless creature to the winged.

Phi. I grant his greatness were his godship sane ! But note his brow ; 'tie Thought's least earthly temple : 'Then mark beneath, that round, not human eye Still glowing like a panther's ! In his body No passion dwells, but all his mind is pasaion, Wild intellectual appetite and instinct That works without a law.

Par. But half you know him :

There is a zigzag lightning in his brain 'That flies in random flashes yet not errs : His victories seem but chances :—link those chances And under them a science you shall find Though unauthentic, contraband, illicit, Yea, contumelious oft to laws of war.

Fortune, that as a mistress smiles on others, Serves him as duty-bound : her blood is he, Born in the purple of her royalties."

Tlihat is noble poetry, if there be noble poetry in the English language ; and though no doubt it surpasses greatly most of the specimens in this fascinating little book, yet our previous extracts will show the reader Mr. de Tere's usual level, and we venture to say that it is a level which very few living Englishmen have surpassed. Mr. Dennis deserves the warmest thanks of his readers for condensing into so handy a volume so much that stirs the heart and exalts the imagination.