Page:The Poet's Chantry pg 057.jpg

Rh obscure the full stress of these "stormy passions." De Vere kept his eyes upon the heights, forgetting, or not forgetting, that only the saints dwell thereon. All too little is there in his Records of that fierce conflict of soul and sense, that youthful, passionate ardour both in good and evil, to which the very penances of the ancient Church bear witness.

so declares one of de Vere's youthful knights, with a detachment and a spiritual grasp characteristic, indeed, of the modern poet—and in no age possible, one suspects, to the mass of men and women.

Quotations from narrative poems are seldom satisfying when the poet's virtue lies rather in sustained and comprehensive excellence than in "purple passages." But a number of these legends or records resolve themselves, through their strongly personal quality, into the form of dramatic monologues. The chosen spokesmen are all of exalted and philosophic tendencies, and they are depicted at moments when "life's fitful fever" is well-nigh spent. Yet there is no dull uniformity in the setting of the sun—still less in the passing of a soul. De Vere has made the contrast of temperament exceedingly forcible, for instance, in the final soliloquies of Constantine and St. Jerome. Each looks back upon a "life of wars"; upon aspiration and failure and much hunger of the spirit; but the difference is as of storm-cloud and starlight. Grimly the frustrated Emperor reviews his gigantic efforts to rebuild the Roman structure, and his cry is vanitas: