Two others, by which he is probably best known to American readers, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, one written March, 1860, the other, June 12, 1861, addressed to Charles Eliot Norton, the editor of the North American Review. Both relate to the national struggle, and indicate a somewhat lively interest in our affairs, but otherwise are not remarkable. Much better than these we find the following. It is a good sample besides of the author's general style: "Silence and sleep, and midnight's softest gloom, Consoling friends of fast declining years, Benign assuagers of unfruitful tears, Soft-footed heralds of the wished-four tomb! Go to your master, Death--the monarch whom Ye serve, whose majesty your grace endears. And in the awful hollows of his ears Murmur, oh! ever murmur: 'Come, O come!' Virginal rights have I observed full long, And all observance worthy of a bride. Then wherefore, Death, dost thou to me is wrong, So long estranged to linger from my side? Am I not thine? Oh! breathe upon my eyes A gentle answer, Death, from thine elysian skies!" {77} It is no easy thing to be publicly and yet gracefully sad. Do not we mentally associate an idea of weakness or effeminacy with melancholic writings? Yet here is--we feel it at once--the true sadness we all respect: the unaffected weariness which does not cry out its grief, but sighs because it suffers and is strong. It is not often that De Vere leaves the lofty pinnacles of thought or the pleasant hills of fancy for sterner fields, but here for once he swoops from his eyrie into the following scathing lines. They are the last of five very spirited sonnets on Colonization, each of which is worth quoting, did but our space permit: "England, magnanimous art thou in name; Magnanimous in nature once thou wert; But that which ofttimes lags behind desert, And crowns the dead, as oft survives it--fame. Can she whose hand a merchant's pen makes tame, Or sneer of nameless scribe--can she whose heart In camp or senate still is at the mart, A nation's toils, a nation's honors claim? Thy shield of old torn Poland twice and thrice Invoked; thy help as vainly Ireland asks, Pointing with stark, lean linger from the West-- Of western cliffs plague-stricken, from the West-- Gray-haired though young. When heat is sucked from ice, Then shall a Firm discharge a national task." This speaks for itself. It sums up the faults of the English nation better in a dozen lines than a congress of vaporers about British tyranny or essayists on _perfide Albion_ could do in a month of mouthings. There is not a weak line or phrase in it, or one that is not auxiliary to the general effect intended. This, in short, is what we call masterly.