well and Crashaw, to whose sweet memory they were dedicated; but de Vere's affinities were not with these choristers of the fiery heart and rapturous voice. His later and abiding model was Wordsworth, whose simple diction, his deep sincerity and Nature-brooding, mark de Vere's religious cycle, the May Carols. These are infallibly tender and reverent; they are lucid, even epigrammatic at moments; their subject-matter is sublimely spiritual. But the poems (save, perhaps, those exquisite little interspersed landscape reveries) are not carols at all. They are a prolonged meditation upon Christian truths centring round about the Incarnation. "Mater Christi," one of the least theological, will illustrate the tranquil beauty of the series:
He willed to lack, he willed to bear;
He willed by suffering to be schooled;
He willed the chains of flesh to wear:
Yet from her arms the world He ruled.
······
He sat beside the lowly door;
His homeless eyes appeared to trace
In evening skies remembered lore,
And shadows of His Father's face.
One only knew him. She alone
Who nightly to His cradle crept,
And, lying like the moonbeams prone,
Worshipped her Maker as He slept.
It is the obtrusion of a sort of glorified catechetical instruction, and the subordination of the pure poetic quality, which mars many of these May Carols. The tendency is not towards the mystical but towards the metaphysical. Sadly enough, all this was merely de Vere's passionate love of truth, "strained from its fair use" with the usual
