No cloud of passion to usurp thy brow,
Or mar thy hospitality; no wave
Of mortal tumult to obliterate
The soul's marmoreal calmness: Grief should be,
Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate,
Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free;
Strong to consume small troubles; to commend
Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end.
Great and grave thoughts, high and holy thoughts: such were the habitual companions of Aubrey de Vere. He weighed life by those spiritual values which were to him the only realities. And so the religious, the Catholic element permeates his work as sunlight radiates a summer noon. But religion transfigures without changing the character; it spiritualises without in any wise stereotyping the imagination. It may, as in Crashaw or Coventry Patmore, surcharge the emotions; or it may dominate the intellect in its most characteristic channel—with de Vere the channel of philosophic meditation. He looked not merely through the deeds of men, but equally through the pageant of external Nature. When, for example, one reads his finely poetical "Autumnal Ode," one meets very little of that mournful or exultant sensuousness with which poets have immemorially watched the death of summer. There are loving suggestions of the blackbird's last carol, of "dusk-bright cobwebs" and the glory of "sunset forests," but through this symbolic pageant of autumn the poet passes to thoughts of the saintly dead. Precisely this same passion for interpretation runs through his beautiful "Ascent of the Apennines." It is plaintive in that most characteristic "Ode to an Eolian Harp," and in very truth it penetrates his entire secular and religious verse.
