etc.; 1872, Legends of St. Patrick; 1874, Alexander the Great; 1876, St. Thomas of Canterbury; 1882, The Foray of Queene Maeve and Legends of Ireland's Heroic Age; 1887, Legends and Records of the Church and the Empire; 1893, Mediæval Records and Sonnets; and in 1897 (his eighty-third year), St. Peter's Chains, a series of sonnets on the Italian Revolution. While incomplete, this bibliography includes epic, lyric, and dramatic verse.
Elsewhere tracing Irish history back almost to the legendary days of the Sidhe, in the latter part of Inisfail, and in numerous minor poems, de Vere tells the tragic story of his country's recent years. The beautiful closing stanzas of "The Year of Sorrow" illustrate how much of pathos yet how little of bitterness de Vere infused into his elegy of 1849:
Fall, snow, and cease not! Flake by flake
The decent winding-sheet compose.
Thy task is just and pious; make
An end of blasphemies and woes.
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On quaking moor and mountain moss,
With eyes upstaring at the sky,
With 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 bands and feet, and thence
Remove the trace of sin and tears.
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