Whatever Mr. De Vere writes is welcomed by a select audience.  Not taking rank among the great masters of English poetry, he yet possesses a genuine poetic faculty which distinguishes him from “the small harpers with their glees” who counterfeit the true gift of Nature.  In refined and delicate sensibility, in purity of feeling, in elevation of tone, there is no English writer of verse at the present day who surpasses him.  The fine instinct of a poet is united in him with the cultivated taste of a scholar.  There is nothing forced or spasmodic in his verse; it is the true expression of character disciplined by thought and study, of fancy quickened by ready sympathies, of feeling deepened and calmed by faith.  As is the case with most English poets since Wordsworth, he invests the impressions received from the various aspects of Nature with moral associations, and with fine spiritual insight he seeks out the inner meaning of the external life of the earth.  No one describes more truthfully than he those transient beauties of Nature which in their briefness and their exquisite variety of change elude the coarse grasp of the common observer, and too frequently pass half unnoticed and unfelt even by those whose temperament is susceptive of their inspiring influences, but whose thoughts are occupied with the cares and business of living.  But it is especially as the poet of Ireland, and of the Roman Church, that Mr. De Vere presents himself to us in this last volume; and while, consequently, the subject and treatment of many of the poems contained in it give to them a special rather than a universal interest, the patriotic spirit and the fervor of faith manifest in them appeal powerfully to the sympathies of readers in other countries and of other creeds. “‘Inisfail’ may be regarded as a sort of National Chronicle, cast in a form partly lyrical, partly narrative....  Its aim is to record the past alone, and that chiefly as its chances might have been sung by those old bards, who, consciously or unconsciously, uttered the voice which comes from a people’s heart.”  In this attempt Mr. De Vere has had an uncommon measure of success.  The strings of the Irish harp sound with the cadences of fitting harmonies under his hand, as he sings of the sorrows and the joys of Ireland, of the wild storms and the rare sunshine of her pathetic history,—­as he denounces vengeance on her oppressors, or blesses the saints and the heroes who have made the land dear and beautiful to its children.  The key-note of the series of poems which form this poetic chronicle is struck in the fine verses with which it begins, entitled “History,” and of which our space allows us to quote but the opening stanza:—­

  “At my casement I sat by night, while the wind far off in dark valleys
  Voluminous gathered and grew, and waxing swelled to a gale;
  An hour I heard it, or more, ere yet it sobbed on my lattice: 
  Far off, ’t was a People’s moan; hard by, but a widow’s wail.