Lo! from the starry Temple Gates
Death rides, and bears the flag of peace :
The combatants he separates;

He bids the wrath of ages cease.

Descend, benignant Power! But O,
Ye torrents shake no more the vale :
Dark streams, in silence seaward flow :
Thou rising storm remit thy wail.

Shake not, to-night, the cliffs of Moher,
Nor Brandon's base, rough sea! Thou Isle.
The Rite proceeds! From shore to shore,
Hold in thy gather'd breath the while.

Fall snow! in stillness fall, like dew,
On church's roof and cedar's fan ;
And mould thyself on pine and yew;
And on the awful face of man.

Without a sound, without a stir,

In streets and wolds, on rock and mound,

O, omnipresent Comforter,

By thee, this night, the lost are found!

On quaking moor and mountain moss
With eyes upstaring at the sky,
And arms extended like a cross,

The long-expectant sufferers lie.

Bend o'er them, white-robed Acolyte !

Put forth thine hand from cloud and mist;

And minister the last sad Rite,

Where altar there is none, nor priest.

Touch thou the gates of soul and sense;
Touch darkening eyes and dying ears;
Touch stiffening hands and feet, and thence
Remove the trace of sin and tears.

And ere thou seal these filmèd eyes,
Into God's urn thy fingers dip,

And lay 'mid eucharistic sighs,
The sacred wafer on the lip.

This night the Absolver issues forth:

This night the Eternal Victim bleeds :
O winds and words- O heaven and earth;
Be still this night. The Rite proceeds!

Scarcely less grand, and making up for what it lacks of grandeur by its terrible, merciless minuteness, is the following

on the same subject, from Mr. De Vere's poem of "The Sisters" :

Sudden fell

Famine, the Terror never absent long,
Upon our land. It shrank, the daily dole;
The oatmeal trickled from a tighter grasp;
Hunger grew wild through panic; infant cries
Madden'd at times the gentle into wrong;
Death's gentleness more oft for death made way;
And like a lamb that openeth not its mouth
The Sacrificial People, fillet-bound,

Stood up to die. Amid inviolate herds

Thousands the sacrament of death received,

These waited God's decree. These things are known:
Strangers have witness'd to them; strangers writ
The epitaph again and yet again.

The nettles and the weeds by the wayside

Men ate from sharpening features and sunk eyes
Hunger glared forth, a wolf more lean each hour;
Children seemed pigmies shrivell'd to sudden age;
And the deserted babe too weak to wail

But shook if hands, pitying or curious, raised
The rag across him thrown.

The same power and the same pathos which Mr. De Vere has shown in speaking of the Famine Years are his also when speaking of the earlier at least in its worst phases, earlierperiod of the Penal Laws. We can in illustration give but a single extract; and it we select from others more powerful, because it is nearest to our hand. It is, like the extract last quoted, taken from "The Sisters":

Thus question after question

Dragg'd, maim'd and mangled, dragg'd reluctant forth
Time's dread confession! Crime replied to crime:

Whom Tudor planted Cromwell rooted out;

For Charles they fought :-to fight for Kings their spoilers

The Rebel named rebellion! William next!

Once more the nobles were down hurl'd; once more

Nobility as in commission placed

By God among the lowly. Loyalty

To native Princes, or to Norman chiefs,

Their lawless conquerors, or to British Kings,
Or her the Mother Church who ne'er betray'd,
Had met the same reward. The legend spake
Words few but plain, grim rubric traced in blood;
While, like a Fury fleeting through the air,
History from all the octaves of her lyre

Struck but one note! What rifted tower and keep
Witness'd of tyrannous and relentless wars,

That shipless gulfs, that bridgeless streams and moors,
Black as if lightning-scarr'd, or curst of God,
Proclaim'd of laws blacker than brand or blight-
Those Penal Laws. The tale was none of mine;
Stone rail'd at stone; grey ruins dumbly frown'd
Defiance, and the ruin-handled blast

Scatter'd the fragments of Cassandra's curse

From the far mountains to the tombs close by
Which mutter'd treason.

It has been very customary and very natural for Irishmen to brood much over their country's sorrows. It has been very customary and very natural for Irish poets to draw from the woes and wrongs of Ireland their strongest inspiration. What the brooding often ends in has been, even in our own time, but too apparent. What chord the bards strike is equally well known. The Irish are essentially a hot, hasty race, "easy to be drawn, but impossible to be driven," hating above all things injustice and oppression; and the Irish Poet is, as a matter of course, an Irishman of the intensest type. But Mr. De Vere is not only a true poet, but he is a wise man; and his wisdom gives his poetry both "a conscience and an aim." That he could, if he chose, write as fiercely as any of the Poets of Young Ireland is evident enough from the following stanza :

Up with the banner whose green shall live

While lives the green on the oak!

And down with the axes that grind and rive
Keen-edged as the thunder-stroke!

And on with the battle-cry known of old,
And the clan-rush like wind and wave:
On, on the Invader is bought and sold;
His own hand has dug his grave!

But he did not choose to devote himself to the literature of blood and iron. His Ireland is a very different Ireland from her who makes "the false Saxon yield," and who keeps military appointments "at the rising of the moon." For his mind, revolution and reprisals have no beauty and no blessing. Revolution and reprisals, he thinks, are bad anywhere, but they are sacrilege in Ireland. S. Paul must not turn pugilist in the end of his days: he that fought with beasts at Ephesus must not end his career as a patron and performer in Irthonian amusements; and the common market-place or the common prize-ring of common nations is no fit place for Holy Ireland,

That is the sentiment of Mr. De Vere. It has been his sentiment from the commencement of his literary career. It is no less his sentiment to-day. In the very latest and grandest of his poems this is how her Great Apostle, already nigh to death, addresses Ireland :

That sunk'st to rise, that Time shall come at last
When in thy splendour thou shalt rise no more;
And darkening with the darkening of thy face
Who worshipp'd thee with thee shall cease; but thou
Who worshipp'd Christ with Christ shall shine abroad
Eternal beam, and Sun of Righteousness

In endless glory. For His sake alone

I, bondsman in this land, re-sought this land.

All ye who name my name in later times,
Say to this people that their Patriarch gave
Pattern of pardon, ere in words he preach'd
That God who pardons. Wrongs if they endure
In after years, with fire of pardoning love
Sin-slaying, bid them crown the head that err'd ;
For bread denied let them give Sacraments,

For darkness light, and for the House of Bondage
The glorious freedom of the sons of God.

We are far, we would say in passing, from being insensible to the surpassing merit of the poetry of Young Ireland. That poetry we distinguish utterly from the Irish patriotic verses of later years. When we hint displeasure with the modern poets of Ireland, we are not thinking of the companions of Davis and Duffy, Mangan and M'Gee. The men of '48 constitute a class splendidly and perennially apart. Even those who have no sympathy with their political aspirations must perforce regard them as in genius and nobleness worthy of any nation and of any age. We do not, in fact, know of any nation in any age which saw so much of the highest endowment so suddenly arise for the support of one sole cause. We do not be

lieve that even politically the Young Ireland Party was fruitless for Ireland. But no matter what it achieved or failed to achieve for her in politics, in literature it left her a gift that will enrich her for ever. There are, for instance, in the few things bequeathed by Davis, indications of a genius loftier and larger, more passionate and more profound, than any we claim for Mr. De Vere. And Davis was only a single star in a splendid constellation, his light most visible only because it was nearest to our earthly sphere. Nor is the poetry of '48 like the poetry of Byron, a poetry of great genius misapplied and abused. It is inspired throughout by a lofty spirit, and often, as in the case of M'Gee or MacCarthy, directed to highly religious ends. That was indeed a glorious band-those young men of great hearts and hopes, whose one love was the love of country, and whose one endeavour was to gather together her scattered strength, and by sheer genius "to build up a noble nation"! But they were, after all, though more heavenly-gifted, more earthly-guided, than Mr. De Vere. Their conception of Ireland lacked the grandeur of his. With them she is only a nation like other nations, higher in gifts but not different in destiny, and their exhortations to her do not reach those deeper deeps pierced by him who bids her "to lesser nations leave inferior crowns." When all is said, this Ireland is a political Ireland, whose heart and soul are to desire, whose brain and hands are to work for national political glory. This is especially visible when they speak of her past sorrows. These sorrows are not her crown, but her disgrace—are the signs of weakness, and not the proofs of superhuman strength. And hence their words to her are words that speak of her kingdom as a kingdom of this world; and they rarely, if ever, tell her that even if she had twelve legions of angels, it is better to go on from Gethsemane to Calvary than to smite her foes and sit on an earthly throne. It has been said of Cardinal Cullen, we know not with what truth, that he looks on Ireland as predestined to teach to nations what our Blessed Saviour taught to men; this, namely, that the royal road to heaven is the rugged road of suffering. That is surely about the highest conception that one could have of the destiny of the Island of Saints. It was not the conception entertained by Young Ireland. It is evidently the conception entertained by Mr.

De Vere.

But even after singing the dark days of Ireland's suffering, and the bright days of Ireland's greatness, Mr. De Vere's work as the poet of the Irish Church was incomplete. The period of Ireland's evangelization remained unsung. This, though the first in order of time, was the last period to benefit by