It is a misfortune, even if a flattering one, for an author's personality to overshadow his literary reputation. Such, long ago, was the fate of the patriarchal Dr. Johnson (about whom we have all read so much), and such, in a modern instance, would seem to be the case with Aubrey de Vere. His own Recollections, and the more exhaustive Memoir by his friend Wilfrid Ward, are on the shelves of many a library which boasts few volumes of his prose and none at all of his poetry. The gracious culture of his Irish home at Curragh Chase; the story of his travels and his friendships with the greatest men and women of the time; the Famine years which woke the dreamer into a man of heroic action; the spiritual pilgrimage which led him eventually into the Catholic communion—all this is familiar enough to need no repetition. It is Aubrey de Vere's poetic achievement to which adequate recognition is but seldom accorded. "I have lived among poets a great deal and have known greater poets than he is," wrote Sara Coleridge in a memorable passage, "but a more entire poet, and one more a poet in his whole mind and temperament, I never knew or met with."
Aubrey de Vere's half-century of poetic preoccupation was richly various in its fruitfulness. The Search after Proserpine appeared in 1843; ten years later, a volume of Miscellaneous and Sacred Poems; in 1857 came the first of the May Carols (completed in 1881); in 1861, Inisfail, The Sisters,
