Out of the greater breadth and catholicity, so to speak, of our present literary taste, it results that one class of poets is arising among as which has been very rare before our day: those in whom the soul is the predominant force--men who care nothing for popularity, and barely enough for recognition by their peers to make them publish at all--men by nature high-strung and shy, yet tranquil, balanced, and strong; who write, in short, from the spiritual side of things. These could not, in ordinary times, hope for a wide, general favor, and they sailed the nautiluses of literature; dropping from the surface of themselves, equally native to the cooler, deeper waters below. But so strong have been the gales of awakening love of reading, that even these stranger ships, not bound for the ports of popularity, find wind enough to waft them wherever refinement and scholarship care to deal in their rare and choice cargoes. An extreme of this class is Aubrey de Vere. Naturally not a poet of the people, and still further isolated by holding and eloquently celebrating a faith which incurs certain ostracism from the literature of sectarian bigotry, he is almost unknown in America. Fresh from his works, we are almost at a loss to understand how, in a country not only of so many Catholic leaders, but where there is so much pretension to literary taste, he can be such a stranger. All the usual and more accessible sources are so barren of his biography that we cannot trust ourselves to attempt any sketch of his life. From materials so meagre and of such indifferent authenticity, nothing satisfactory--nothing vivified--can be gathered; and biography that fails in personality is a body without a soul. So we content ourselves with the poet as we see him in his works.