quit the world, and form himself in solitude and silence. And out from his solitude he will, if he choose it, send the words that shake the world.

We therefore think that a main reason why our poets are what they are is because, forgetting their divine duty, they passively permit the world to shape them. But tending far more to the same result, is there another and more deplorable cause. One of the many lamentable things in modern verse is its practical atheism. Our poets write as if they had no God to think of, or as if He were not worth a thought. This is, of course, very disastrous for their readers, but it is quite as disastrous for the writers themselves. Without faith in the perpetual presence of the Divine which makes the Human intelligible, faith heart-piercing and absorbing, there is no true insight and no true inspiration. But our poets, as a rule, have no faith at all. They waste their splendid powers on things trivial or worse. They engender in themselves an incapacity to sympathize with anything except the mediocre and the low. And, as a consequence, whenever they enter upon those "higher arguments" which alone have permanent power over the heart of man, they, like performers who try an octave above their range, do not sing but scream.

The Catholic poet, when God sends him, will be very different. He will not permit the world to form him, for his faith will tell him that for such as he the world's touch is contamination. He will not fear the world's anger or the world's neglect, for he will be looking for a crown from higher hands. He will not speak as one sick or as one doubting, but as one convinced and as one having power. He will not rest in the small or sensuous, for his eyes will be ever seeing through faith, which is the argument of things unseen, not merely the divine idea but the divine and awful reality sustaining and glorifying all things that appear. He will show us a sin-laden and passible humanity, with its work to do and its cross to bear, but he will also show us man arisen !—the grave garments flung aside, and his whole self, body and soul, without one sorrow and without one flaw. His songs, while they pierce our hearts with sorrow for the fair earth which sin has marred, will swell our souls with gladness for the new earth and the new heaven, when sin shall be no more. No little studies and no little models will suffice for him. "Be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect," will be for ever in his ears. And with these words to guide him, he will for ever struggle to make more visible and more loveable-to gather all men's eyes to see, and all men's souls to worship-not any minor or mere earthly excellence, at which, because human longings

transcend humanity, the soul can never stop, but that infinite good and beauty, imaged for ever in every son of Adam, in revealing which art finds its one true function, in working for which the artist finds his one true felicity.

We have been led to make these remarks by Mr. Aubrey de Vere's last book. Mr. De Vere has now been a long time before the English reading public. During that time he has witnessed many of his contemporaries rising (and generally without much apparent trouble) to what, though after a few years it will be only poetic notoriety, at present passes for poetic fame. There was no difficulty in seeing how and why they rose. An orator, Mr. Gladstone has told us, gains his best successes by receiving the feeling of his audience in vapour and flinging it back in flood. That results from the fact that an orator's success must be instantaneous or nothing. The poet who wishes to succeed rapidly, whose nature hungers for instant admiration, has only to take the hint from the orator. And most of our modern poets have done so. They sang to an unchristian public the songs of an unchristian muse; and they sang them well. No one, we think, can without insincerity deny, that in the mere mechanical department of poetic art, Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Morris, and even Mr. Swinburne, are among the most accomplished that our language has yet known. It was only natural that the world should love its own, and should love those among its own best, who are the best images of itself. Mr. Aubrey De Vere knew well that to enter upon the course which he has throughout consistently followed, would be to leave himself, as that other solitary singer left himself, who, too, had "fallen on evil days." But Mr. De Vere was equal to the sacrifice. For more than twenty years he has stood apart on the clear cold heights, where only the higher spirits dwell, and has left it to others to roll and revel in the mud and mire of the lowland pools. He himself tells us the reason in some exquisite lines "On Visiting a Haunt of Coleridge's:"

The world's base Poets have not kept
Song's vigil on her vestal height,
Nor scorn'd false pride and foul delight,

Nor with the weepers rightly wept,
Nor seen God's visions in the night!

Profane to enthrone the Sense, and add
A gleam that lies to shapes that pass,
Ah me! in song as in a glass
They might have shown us glory-clad

His Face Who ever is and was!

They might have shown us cloud and leaf
Lit with the radiance uncreate;

Love, throned o'er vanquish'd Lust and Hate;
Joy, gem-distill'd through rocks of Grief;
And Justice, conquering Time and Fate !

But they immodest brows have crown'd
With violated bud and flower :-
Courting the high Muse "par amour,"
Upon her suppliants she hath frown'd,
And sent them darkness for a dower.
Better half-sight and tear-dimm'd day
Than dust defiled, o'er-sated Touch!
Better the torn wing than the crutch!
Better who hide their gift than they
Who give so basely and so much.

Great Bard! To thee in youth my heart
Rush'd as the maiden's to the boy,
When love, too blithesome to be coy,
No want forebodes and feels no smart,
A self-less love self-brimm'd with joy!
Still sporting with those amaranth leaves
That shape for others coronals,

I ask not on whose head it falls
That crown the Fame Pandemian weaves-
Thee, thee the Fame Uranian calls!

For wilder'd feet point thou the path

Which mounts to where triumphant sit
The Assumed of Earth, all human yet,
From sun-glare safe and tempest's wrath,
Who sing for love: nor those forget,
The Elders crown'd that, singing, fling
Their crowns upon the Temple floor;
Those Elders ever young, though hoar,
Who count all praise an idle thing

Save His who lives for evermore!

Apart from its poetic excellences, from which too they might learn a lesson, we commend that extract to our popular poets for the wise counsel which it contains. Paganism and the passions of paganism are transitory; Christianity and its emotions are everlasting. And no song can live when those whom alone it moves have passed away.

It is now thought praiseworthy in a poet-and alas! what an indication this is of the spirit of the times-if he has

"uttered nothing base." We do not offer such praise to Mr. De Vere. That he has never written a line which could bring a blush to the cheek of the most perfect womanly modesty, or excite indignation in the most sensitive and noble manhood, is simply a consequence of his being an earnest and sincere Catholic. But he can claim in this department much more than the negative purity claimed for Wordsworth. His sympathies have invariably been with nothing but the noblest and grandest things. The emotions in which he himself lives and under whose influence he draws his readers, are not only the most powerful but the most ennobling that can stir man's soul. He has such a horror of the base and impure and petty, that he hardly ever mentions them even in condemnation. Even for what is in itself good he has no great care, unless it be the very best of its kind. With what is called "love-poetry," for instance, he has no strong sympathy, and regrets with a lofty compassion its prevalence in the present age. The love that he speaks of (when he speaks of love at all) is not merely love freed from the dregs of earth, but love lifted up and glorified by the grace of heaven. This is as it should be. While no one denies to love-poetry a considerable place in literature, no wise man ever dreamed that its place is the highest. It is not a healthy sign when the general tendency is towards it alone. Poetry, we should ever remember, has not for its object merely to excite emotion, but, by exciting emotion, to raise humanity. It is not by such emotions, no matter how strong they be, as are excited by amatory verses, that humanity is raised. Milton, notwithstanding his trilogy of wives, had not much of the tender passion, and Shakspere not much of it except in his worst days. Mr. De Vere, in comparison with our modern poets, does not appear to have any of it at all. He has not certainly a particle of it as it is possessed by and possesses some of the most notable of our modern bards. He leaves it to them to do honour to "the darker Venus" and "the singing women of the sea." For him he most often moves

through a land like a land of dream,

Where the things that are, and that shall be, seem

Wov'n into one by a hand of air,

And the Good looks piercingly down through the Fair!

No form material is here unmated,

Here blows no bud, no scent can rise,

No song ring forth, unconsecrated

To a meaning or model in Paradise!

Ex abundantiâ cordis os loquitur. Our blessed Lord's words

may be adapted in quite a special sense to the case of a poet. It follows therefrom that the character of a man's poetry tells the character of the man's self. But the higher a man's sympathies the greater and loftier the man's self will be. The poets, therefore, who by preference select little subjects or treat great subjects in a little way, are essentially little poets. But the subjects of our modern poets are generally extremely small. Even the Laureate has never been able to get beyond King Arthur; and King Arthur, though an exceedingly amiable person, is, when one comes to view him more closely, and to see through the haze around him, nothing better than a courteous, truthful English gentleman. But an English gentleman, no matter how courteous, and no matter how truthful, is, in comparison with what a man is capable of, not much more than what Mr. Mill calls "a a starved specimen of humanity." We are not of those who decry Mr. Tennyson. We are sincerely thankful for even King Arthur, though we should be much better pleased if the "stammering and staring" passage between Sir Lancelot and Guinevere, with much else of the same character, had been kept for the Laureate's own private delectation. But though King Arthur is good, we want something better. Even the pagans have given us such as he. But we live in an age when, if society is to be saved at all, men must form themselves, not on pagan but on Christian models. The natural virtues are very good, but they are not sufficient. Veracity and courtesy and fidelity to a single love will not keep us from the scepticism, and disbelief, and materialism of the times. What on the other hand we particularly admire in Mr. De Vere is, that he has employed his powers, not in making a nation cynical, or trivial, or effeminate, or worse, but in placing before it those noble Christian models-given not by culture, but by God-beside which all natural gentlemen must be for ever contemptible. Catholicity (and therefore society) has had in these times no lay teacher among the poets comparable to Mr. De Vere.

But, great as Mr. De Vere's services to Catholicity and society have been, it was for neither the one nor the other that these services were directly and proximately intended. We ardently wish him yet many years of labour. We ardently expect that before he dies he will leave behind him some crowning song that will address itself to the universal Catholic heart, and thereby to the heart of all humanity. But if we are to judge him by what he has already written, he will take his place among the great singers of the earth, not as the poet of humanity nor as the poet of the Church Catholic and