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My love is of comely height and straight,
And comely in all her ways and gait,

She shows in her face the rose's hue,

And her lids on her eyes are white on blue.

When Elemley club-men walk'd in May,
And folk came in clusters every way,
As soon as the sun dried up the dew,
And clouds in the sky were white on blue,

She came by the down with tripping walk,
By daisies and shining banks of chalk,
And brooks with the crowfoot flow'rs to strew
The sky-tinted water, white on blue;

She nodded her head as play'd the band,
She tapp'd with her.foot as she did stand,
She danc'd in a reel, and wore all new
A skirt with a jacket, white and blue.

I singled her out from thin and stout,
From slender and stout I chose her out,
And what in the evening could I do
But give her my breast-knot white and blue?

THE WIND AT THE DOOR

As daylight darken'd on the dewless
There still, with no one come by me,
To stay awhile at home by me,
Within the house, now dumb by me,
I sat me still as eveningtide did pass.

grass,

And there a windblast shook the rattling door, And seem'd, as wind did moan without,

As if my love alone without,

And standing on the stone without,

Had there come back with happiness once more.

I went to-door, and out from trees, above

My head, upon the blast by me,

Sweet blossoms there were cast by me,

As if my love had pass'd by me,

And flung them down, a token of her love.

Sweet blossoms of the tree where now I mourn,

I thought, if you did blow for her,

For apples that should grow for her,

And fall red-ripe below for her,

Oh! then how happy I should see you kern.

But no.

Too soon my fond illusion broke,

No comely soul in white like her,

No fair one, tripping light like her,
No wife of comely height like her,
Went by, but all my grief again awoke.

AUBREY DE VERE

[AUBREY THOMAS DE VERE was born in January, 1814, at Curragh Chase, Limerick, the third son of Sir Aubrey de Vere, second Baronet, and of his wife who was a Spring Rice. He was educated privately at home, and after 1832 at Trinity College, Dublin. A few years afterwards he paid long visits to England and became intimate with Tennyson, Monckton Milnes, and many distinguished Cambridge men, and afterwards saw a good deal of Wordsworth, Sara Coleridge and Carlyle, while his chief friend from that time to the end of his life was Sir Henry Taylor. In 1842 he published The Waldenses, and other Poems, which was followed next year by The Search after Proserpine. He was deeply religious; and after witnessing the horrors of the Irish famine in 1846 he began to turn his thoughts to Roman Catholicism, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1851, when he was on his way to Italy in company with H. E. Manning. For a few years he held a Professorship, under Newman, in the new Catholic University in Dublin, and in 1857 he published May Carols, and other volumes followed. He retired from the University in 1858, and afterwards lived for the most part at Curragh Chase, where in 1902 he died unmarried, at the age of eightyeight. In 1897 he published a volume of Recollections, and after his death a Memoir of him was written by Mr. Wilfrid Ward.]

Many people still remember with affection the venerable figure of Aubrey de Vere, most devout of Catholics and most amiably patriotic of Irishmen. His was "an old age serene and bright," and at over eighty years of age he still retained the feelings and the instincts of a poet. But throughout the second half of his long life his two predominant passions were religion and Ireland; his poems written in these years, as he says in his Recollections, were almost exclusively "intended to illustrate religious philosophy or early Irish history." And these poems may almost be regarded as interludes in a life greatly occupied with the Irish political and economic problems of the time, to the discussion of which/he frequently contributed. But as a young man poetry-pure poetry -filled a much larger place in his thoughts and activities; naturally enough, for he was a poet's son who up to the age of twenty had lived in almost daily intercourse with his father Sir Aubrey,

whose poetical style and outlook, moreover—as will be recognized by any one who reads his plays Julian the Apostate and Mary Tudor-had a marked affinity to his own. In the days of his early productiveness, too, Aubrey de Vere mingled with the world of London and Cambridge, especially with the men of letters, such as Tennyson and Monckton Milnes, and above all with his intimate friend Henry Taylor. The Lives of several of these men abound with references to him, implying the most cordial intellectual intercourse; in that of Tennyson there are many and in Henry Taylor's Autobiography many more. Again, the three volumes of Critical Essays, which were written at many different dates though they were only collected in 1887-9, show how deeply he had been interested in poetry and how excellent a critic he was. He tells us in his Recollections that Byron was his first admiration, but was instantly displaced when Sir Aubrey put Wordsworth's Laodamia into his hands. It was with him as with Tennyson, in whose Memoir it is recorded that "he was dominated by Byron till he was seventeen, when he put him away altogether." Laodamia converted de Vere; from that moment he was a Wordsworthian, though not an imitator; on the contrary the charming little volume called The Search after Proserpine, and other Poems (1843) shows a gift more lyrical than philosophical, owing more to the influence of Shelley and the Greeks than to that of Rydal Mount.

Several of the extracts that follow are taken from that book, because it is hard to find in his later writings anything so spontaneous, so musical as the best of these poems, and because the volume shows Aubrey de Vere in the stage when poetry filled his soul, when he saw that there were bigger things in the world, in history, and in literature, than the political problems of the day, and when even Religion did not urge him to express her mysteries in verse. Seldom has the spell of Greece been exercised with greater effect than it was upon young de Vere, as he shows in the titlepoem, and in Lines written under Delphi: poems which made old Landor, in 1848, beg him to "reascend with me the steeps of Greece" and to take no heed of Ireland—a country of which the old man writes in terms unfit for ears polite. The curious thing is that this love for Greece and Greek tradition, which rings more true than anything in Childe Harold, seems to have clean passed away from Aubrey de Vere after he became possessed with the religious passion. There is not a single mention of the travels to Greece in the volume of Recollections, and in the well-known May

Carols-May being the month of Mary-he admits that even the descriptive pieces are "an attempt towards a Christian rendering of external nature."

The Coleridge poem here quoted is interesting both as an emotional utterance and as a piece of criticism; and the sonnets deserve their place as an expression of de Vere's intense love for his father, of his regard for his brother poets, and of his religious faith.

[From The Search after Proserpine]

FOUNTAIN NYMPHS

Proserpina was playing

I

In the soft Sicilian clime,
'Mid a thousand damsels maying,
All budding to their prime:
From their regions azure-blazing
The Immortal Concourse gazing
Bent down, and sought in vain

Another earthly shape so meet with them to reign.

2

The steep blue arch above her,

In Jove's own smiles arrayed,
Shone mild, and seemed to love her:

His steeds Apollo stayed:

Soon as the God espied her

Nought else he saw beside her,

Though in that happy clime

EDITOR.

A thousand maids were verging to the fulness of their prime.

Old venerable Ocean

3

Against the meads uprolled
With ever-young emotion

His tides of blue and gold:

He had called with pomp and pæan
From his well-beloved Ægean

All billows to one shore,

To fawn around her footsteps and in murmurs to adore.

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