This night the Absolver issues forth
This night the Eternal Victim bleeds
O winds and woods—O heaven and earth!
Be still this night. The Rite proceeds!
Back through the days of the Penal Laws and the Wars of Religion, through the three centuries of outlawry following the Norman Conquest, runs this "lyrical chronicle," Inisfail; its parts bound together by a continuity of tears and by the poet's insistence upon Ireland's spiritual vocation among the nations of the earth. "No other poem of mine," de Vere wrote some thirty-five years later, "was written more intensely, I may say painfully, from my heart, than Inisfail." And no other poem of his has surpassed it in sweetness or pathos or in a certain fiery, elemental vigour.
In the earlier record, St. Patrick, crozier in hand, passes before us, treading the hills and vales of Erin, preaching to the poor, baptising those sweet sister-princesses, the "Red Rose" and " Ethna the Fair," confounding the proud and winning them to humility:
The Saint his great soul flung upon the world,
And took the people with him like a wind
to the very feet of Christ. It is a series of noble national poems, ending with the final "Striving of St. Patrick" on Mount Cruachan. De Vere's Legends of the Saxon Saints form a companion-work of hagiology. "The English differed much from the Irish," says the poet, "even in their primitive saints. There was less of the wild and strange about them . . . less of the missionary, but more of the Christian subject and citizen." Much of the material for this volume was taken from the Venerable Bede, with which there is
