Page:The Poet's Chantry pg 056.jpg

56 the triumph of that young Church whose face shone as the dawn even when her robe was crimsoned by the sands of the arena; moans of an impotent and effete civilisation mingle with the battle-cries of Constantine or Theodoric; and mighty as some resistless sea is the onrushing sweep of those Northern hordes who triumph at last in the Fall of Rome. It seemed a second Deluge, even to men like St. Jerome. But succeeding legends show how the songs of a new Sion brought their message into the Stranger's Land; they tell of the peaceful conquests of Boniface and Germanus, of the sweet sanctity of St. Genevieve or Queen Clothilde—and at last of Charlemagne's coronation as first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

Mediæval Records and Sonnets continue the history, recounting with the same earnest felicity the Cid's conquests over Moslem power, the stories of Queen Bertha and Jeanne d'Arc and Robert Bruce, of Columbus the discoverer and Copernicus the astronomer. Occasional translations from St. Gertrude or the Fioretti, and a poem of notable beauty and elevation ("The Higher Purgatory") partially transcribed from St. Catherine of Genoa, are further evidence of de Vere's affectionate intimacy with mediæval life. "It was imaginative, not critical," writes the poet in his Preface: "with much of a childish instability and something of that strange and heedless cruelty sometimes to be found in children, it united a childlike simplicity. It loved to wonder and was not afraid of proving mistaken. Stormy passions swept over it, and great crimes alternated with heroic deeds; but it was comparatively free from a more insidious snare than the passions—that of self-love." Perhaps the heaviest charge to be brought against the dramatic reality of the poems is that they do