There are two very noticeable faults of detail in the May Carols. One is the great occasional looseness of rhyme. We are no lover even of the so-called rhymes to the eye--words ending, but not pronounced alike--but when there is no similarity of sound at all, we emphatically demur. Here are some, taken at random, of the numberless false rhymes which disfigure these poems: "Hills--swells;" "height--infinite;" "best--least" (these last two in one short piece of sixteen lines); "buds--multitudes;" "repose--coos;" "flower--more;" "pierce--universe," etc. Now such as these are utterly indefensible. The different sounds of the same vowel are as different among themselves as from any other sounds, and there is no sense in taking advantage of the accident that they are represented by the same letter to cheat the ear and plead the poverty of the alphabet. In a man who labored for words, we could condone a roughness here and there; but in a writer of De Vere's fluency there is no excuse for such gross carelessness. We observe also at intervals a kind of baldness of expression--a ruggedness and disregard of beauty in uttering ideas--that is unpleasant. We think, with a learned friend who first drew our attention to it, that this comes of the authors anxiety and determination to be clear. The lines seem like men trained down to fighting-weight--all strength and no contour. No doubt the high and difficult ideas to be rendered (for it is never seen in the descriptive interludes) constitute ample cause for this fault; but yet, in noticing the whole, we are constrained to note it as a blemish. It remains to speak of the author's poems on Ireland. Here it is evident that he feels warmly as the chief organizer himself; and yet nothing can be further from to-day's Fenianism than the tone of his writings. Irish they are to the core--as animated as the best in proclaiming the wrongs of Ireland and the misrule of the invaders--but from the same premises somehow he seems to draw a different conclusion. This is to our author one of those near and dear subjects which are elements in a man's inner life: he has published another volume [Footnote 21] upon it, and a large portion of his poems turn on it. Most of the best among his single poems--The Irish Celt to the Irish Norman, the Ode to Ireland, the beautiful Year of Sorrow, and others--are either too long or too close-woven for quotation. Another able one is The Sisters, which is full of beautiful thoughts, independent of the Irish bearing. [Footnote 21: English Misrule and Irish Misdeeds. London, 1848.]