Portraits and Sketches Author:Edmund Gosse Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AUBREY DE VERE On January 19, 1902, there passed away in his sleep the most venerable of the then-living poets of the Anglo-Saxon world. There is an old house... more » in County Limerick, with a deer park round it and a lawn that slopes to a lake, all combining to form one of the most exquisite estates in the south of Ireland. There Mr. Aubrey de Vere was born at the beginning of 1814, and there, having reached his eighty-ninth year, he died. It would be impossible to conceive a more gentle, innocent, or delicate life than his was or a more happy one. He did not marry; he consecrated all his activities to the service of literature, and of religion, and of his friends. It was his singular good fortune to be protected from every species of care or anxiety. He was not rich, yet he had the ease and dignity of circumstance which make it possible to concentrate the mind on higher thoughts than surround our daily bread. He was not poor, and yet he was screened by conditions from all that makes the possession of wealth disturbing and hardening. Mr. Aubrey de Vere was more fortunate than the farm-folk in Virgil, for he knew that he was happy. In themoderation of his desires, in the resigning of all vain ambitions, he was as wise as he was pure and good. Among my treasures I possess a copy of the " Sonnets" of his father, Sir Aubrey de Vere, presented to me by the son, as a kind inscription sets forth, in the year 1869. For the guidance of posterity, however, I have to say that I was not acquainted with Mr. de Vere at so tender an age as this would seem to imply. By one of those slips of the pen which we all make, but which in old age we forget to amend, Mr. de Vere wrote 1869 when he meant 1896. It was, in fact, not until the latter year that I had the privilege of forming an acquaintance whi...« less