⁷Ferguson, Mary Catharine Guinness. Sir Samuel Ferguson in the Ireland of His Day. Vol. 2. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1896. 82-85.
The poem "Aideen's Grave" was also published in collections by the author, and subsequently by many others. One reviewer wrote in 1889, "Sir Samuel Ferguson's poetry is delightful in its lyrical and elegiac vein as well as in its narrative. A better specimen of it can hardly be referred to than 'Aideen's Grave'...Obviously its qualities are those characteristic of the noble, not the ignoble, poetry, viz. passion, imagination, vigour, an epic largeness of conception, wide human sympathies, vivid and truthful description; while with these it unites none of the vulgar stimulants for exhausted or morbid poetic appetites, whether the epicurean seasoning, the skeptical, or the revolutionary. Its diction is pure, its metre full of variety; and with these merits, common to all true poetry, it unites an insight which only a man of genius can possess into the special characteristics of those ancient times and manners which are so frequently its subject. His Irish poetry is Irish, not, like a good deal which bears that name, i.e. by dint of being bad English, while stuffed with but the vulgarer accidents, not the essential characteristics of Gaelic Ireland—not thus, but by having the genuine Gaelic spirit in it. That spirit, like the Irish airs, its most authentic expression, has much of the minor key about it, and many 'shrill notes of anger' besides; but alike with its sadness, its fierceness, and its wild fits of mirth, a witching tenderness is mingled; and all those qualities are largely found in Sir Samuel Ferguson's poetry." (De Vere, Aubrey. Essays, Chiefly Literary and Ethical. London: Macmillan and Co., 1889. 120-25.)