ART. II.-Poems. By AUBREY DE VERE. Post 8vo. London: Burns and Lambert, 1855.

EVEN though Mr. De Vere appeared now for the first

time as a poet, no one who has ever read a page of his prose could doubt his capacity for poetry, and for poetry of the very highest order. The best-known of his prose works, his "Picturesque Sketches in Greece and Turkey," although it never once outsteps the legitimate boundaries of prose, yet overflows with silent and unobtruded evidences of all the best characteristics of high poetical genius. There are few modern books of travel which display in higher activity that power which is the great source of the physical inspiration of the poet-the sensibility to natural beauty, at once quick and profound, through which the conceptive faculty draws all its best supplies of imagery; and still fewer which exhibit so beautifully that elevation of tone and instinctive appreciation of moral beauty, which alone imparts soul to the images derived from material things, and raises the sensuous creations of the poet beyond the region of sense. There were many passages in that admirable work which reminded us so forcibly of the only class of poetical composition to which good prose can ever bear a close resemblance-the solemn and stately Sonnet-that, even while we read them, we could almost fancy that we but had before us an unmetrical translation of some of the happiest and most classical of the truly classic sonnets of Schiller.

Nevertheless, neither this indication of high poetical powers, nor the unquestionable merit of many of the poems actually published by Mr. De Vere, had prepared us for such a volume as that which lies upon our table-for such rare and various beauty, such richness of imagination and profundity of thought, such a union of elegance and force, of terseness and luxuriance, of freshness and maturity.

Nor are these the sole, or, even in our eyes, the most remarkable characteristics of Mr. De Vere's poetry. By far the larger proportion of his present collection belongs to that metaphysical class which later writers, both in England and America, have made so popular, and which,

in the schools of modern poetry, holds the same position as the philosophy of Fichte in the field of mental science. He deals but little with the outer world. His speculations are essentially subjective-drawn from what Tennyson has called

The abysmal deeps of Personality.

Now we need scarcely say that through all the speculations of this school of poetry, as of its kindred school of philosophy, there runs a tone with which an humble catholic mind can have but few sympathies. The ideal of virtue which it supposes is utterly irreconcilable with the philosophy of the Cross. Pursued to its first principles, as Emerson, for example, has evolved them, it resolves itself, (if considered as a moral system at all,) into a subtle system of self-worship-a generous, humanly speaking, and ennobling worship, it is true-but yet a real self-worship-a practical deification of manhood. In the motives of action which it proposes every maxim of Christian morality is ignored, perhaps we should rather say, reversed. The humility of the Gospel is utterly unthought of. Its lessons of obedience and of love are kept entirely out of view. In their place are substituted either fierce and contemptuous defiance, like unhappy Shelley's; or vague aspirations after "the higher life," such as is dimly shadowed out in Longfellow's" Excelsior;" or hard lessons of self-reliance; empty warnings that

"Life is real! Life is earnest!"

and dreamy exhortations to follow the guidance of "the star of the unconquered will" to

Fear not, in a world like this,
And thou shalt know ere long,
Know how sublime a thing it is
To suffer, and be strong!

In a word, the whole teaching of this poetical morality is a direct appeal to human pride and human self-reliance; not merely as abstracting from reliance upon God, or on His grace, but even as contradistinguished from it, and as opposed to it. And although this may appear to some a matter of little practical importance; although many may be disposed to regard such lessons as these in the light of mere poet's dreams, utterly without moral significance or effective influence upon real life, yet we cannot bring our

selves to share this feeling. It is perfectly true that there are many readers for whom they will be a matter of mere æsthetics; but there are others for whom they will be of most serious and real import. We are but too well convinced that suggestions so flattering to the pride of man's heart cannot fail to find, in many instances, a ready acceptance and a hearty sympathy, especially from young and impressible minds. Nay, we believe that it is all but impossible for a youthful imagination, accustomed, even by mere poetical association, to place itself in habitual contact with such thoughts as these, to avoid contracting, almost insensibly, the spirit which they breathe; learning to seek within himself every end of action, as well, as every source of strength; in a word, forgetting God altogether, and practically merging the childlike philosophy of the Cross in the stern and haughty prayer of the Strong Man.

O star of Strength! I see thee stand,

And smile upon my pain!

Thou beckonest with thy mailed hand
And I am strong again!

And this, even more than our sense of his high poetical merit, is the source of our satisfaction in welcoming the appearance of such a poet as Mr. De Vere amongst us. We rejoice to see the influence of the popular and attractive school of poetry to which he belongs enlisted in the service of true christian philosophy. We rejoice to see a living example that it is possible to be profound and at the same time religious; that it is possible to be hopeful and yet lowly-minded; that it is possible, in fine, to look within man's heart and yet draw from it lessons of christian humility. And we trust it is in no spirit of idle triumph that we avow it as another, though a secondary source of our satisfaction, that, in numbering over those who, within the last eventful years of the history of our Church, have, under God's guidance, found a shelter within her bosom, we are able to point to such an example as this

How much that Genius boasts as hers

And fancies hers alone,

On you, Meek Spirits, Faith confers!

-The proud have further gone

Perhaps, through life's deep maze-but you
Alone possess the labyrinth's clue!

"

Apart, however, from every such consideration as these, such a volume as Mr. De Vere's could hardly fail to command attention at any period. Although it consists exclusively of short and fugitive pieces, yet there is hardly one of them which does not exhibit the characteristics of genuine poetry. In many of the lighter poems we are reminded of the very best and happiest efforts of Tennyson. The more profoundly metaphysical, although directly opposite in their tendency and tone, bear a strong resemblance in conception and execution to those of Shelley, being marked by the same vigour and fertility of the conceptive faculty, the same truth and harmony in the use of imagery, the same rare copiousness and felicity of poetical vocabulary, and above all, the same strongly subjective character to which we have already alluded. It is a strange, and, alas! an humbling reflection that the same self-study the same "question of th' Infinity within". which results in that blessed philosophy wherewith Mr. De Vere's poetry is instinct, has also led, under other lights and other guidance, to the withering conclusion, that "Infinity within,

Infinity without, belie creation!

The exterminable spirit it contains
Is nature's only God!"

Would that every "self-student" could be animated by the sentiment which breathes through Mr. De Vere's beautiful lines,

"VIA INTELLIGENTIÆ !"

"O wash thine eyes with many a bitter tear;
And all things shall grow clear.

Bend that proud forehead nearer to the ground;

And catch a far foot's sound.

Say! wouldst thou know what faithful suppliants feel?

Thou, too, even thou, must kneel.

Do but thy part; and ask not why or how :

Religion is a Vow.

They sang not idle songs; pledges they made
For thee, an infant, laid

In the Church's lucid bosom. These must thou

Fulfil, or else renounce! Fulfil them now.

A Cross, and not a wreath was planted on thy brow."

The great characteristic, indeed, of Mr. De Vere's poetry is reality-a quality which is discernible in all that

he has written. We do not know any writer who deals so largely with the ideal world, and yet moves with so firm a tread among its most unpalpable forms. We know no one so profuse in the use of imagery, whose images, at the same time, are so natural and so well sustained. His conceptive faculty is endowed with the rare power of realizing thoroughly to itself every object which it imagines. He seems to live among the creations of his fancy, however abstract, and to possess the power of bestowing upon them at will a distinct and clearly appreciable individuality. His most spiritual conceptions possess a personality as palpable to the mind as the hardest corporeal image to the eye or sense, and they all harmonize as consistently together as they are each true in themselves. In many of his poems there is a sort of hidden allegory, which nevertheless makes itself silently felt; and which, while it is perfectly intelligible, is even the more effective for the very dimness of the light in which it seems to be presented.

So again with the classical and historical allusions in which he delights, and in which his sonnets especially abound. Never far-fetched or unnatural-never introduced for themselves, or for the sake of their own beautythey seem always the genuine and spontaneous fruit of a teeming memory, highly cultivated, and overflowing with its own abundance. We cannot recall a single illustration of this class, in the whole compass of his volume, which we could suppose to have been sought out, and not rather to have presented itself of its own accord, and grown naturally out of the working of a well-stored mind. His pathos, too, is the pathos of nature itself—a feeling, and not a sentiment, and one the presence of which is felt rather than described. Above all, the love of nature in all its forms of beauty, physical, intellectual, moral, is in Mr. De Vere's verse a genuine passion, inspiring every thought, giving force to every image and truth, and stamping reality upon every description. And when we add to this the singular richness and felicity of his vocabulary, his rare mastery over the very hardest and most unpliant forms of our language, and his peculiarly correct and truthful sense of rhythmical structure, we shall hardly, even still, have done justice to our own estimate of his high qualities as a poet.

These are qualities, too, which make themselves felt especially in Mr. De Vere's religious poetry. There is