In attempting an analysis of the qualities displayed in these volumes, we find, to begin with, none of the inequalities of those writers who begin quite young, and whose works go comet-like through after years, the youthful nebulosity tailing off from the maturer nucleus, in a long string of promising but not much performing versicles. There is none of the crudeness of journey work, but everywhere thought and gravity. The latter quality indeed is conspicuous. De Vere can be too sarcastic for us to deny him wit, but humor seems to be unknown to him. There is not the ghost of a joke in all his pages. We call this remarkable, because he treats of so very many things. In Thomson's Seasons (even waiving Thomson's nationality) or Paradise Lost--in any one poem--we may not expect humor; but in a miscellany, where every side of a man's mind usually displays itself, it seems odd not to find a trace of sense of the ludicrous. Certainly there is variety enough for it. The range of subjects is perhaps not very great, but the individual poems exhibit almost every shade of style, beginning on the hither side of quaintness and bringing up on the boundaries of the colloquial. {74} An artificial style like that of the Idyls of the King, or the Emersonian dialect ("_virtute ac vitiis sapientia crescat_"), our author never attempts; his thoughts, as a rule, seem to choose their own channel. He is willing enough to spend pains in making a thought clear, but such grave, antique costuming of ideas he takes no time for. The manner is always kept well in subordination to the matter of what he has to say.