Lilian down to his Ida, his Psyche, and his Maud; but they have been of dreamy, shadowy quality, doubtful as to flesh and blood, and with eyes having little or no speculation in them. He is far greater and far better when he has, as he now has, a good raw material ready to his hand, than when he draws only on the airy or chaotic regions of what Carlyle calls unconditioned possibility. He is made not so much to convert the moor into the field, as the field into the rich and gorgeous garden. The imperfect nisus, which might be remarked in some former works, has at length reached the fulness of dramatic energy: in the Idylls we have no vagueness or thinness to complain of everything lives and moves, in the royal strength of nature: the fire of Prometheus has fairly caught the clay: each figure stands clear, broad, and sharp before us, as if it had sky for its background: and this of small as well as great, for even the "little novice " is projected on the canvas with the utmost truth and vigour, and with that admirable effect in heightening the great figure of Guinevere, which Patroclus produces for the character of Achilles, and (as some will have it) the modest structure of St. Margaret's for the giant proportions of Westminster Abbey. And this, we repeat, is the crowning gift of the poet: the power of conceiving and representing man. 57. We do not believe that a Milton-or, in other words, the writer of a 'Paradise Lost '-could ever be so great as a Shakespeare or a Homer, because (setting aside all other questions) his chief characters are neither human, nor can they be legitimately founded upon humanity;* * * [But I commend to the notice of the reader the Saggio of Bonaventura Zumbini on the sublime Satan of Paradise Lost,' in 'Saggi Critici,' Napoli, 1876.-W. E. G., 1878.] and, moreover, what he has to represent of man is, by the very law of its being, limited in scale and development. Here at least the saying is a true one in its full scope; Antiquitas sæculi, juventus mundi; rendered by our Laureate in The Day-dream,' "For we are ancients of the earth, And in the morning of the times." The Adam and Eve of Paradise exhibit to us the first inception of our race; and neither then, nor after their first sad lesson, could they furnish those materials for representations, which their descendants have accumulated in the school of their incessant and many-coloured, but on the whole too gloomy, experience. To the long chapters of that experience, every generation of man makes its own addition. Again we ask the aid of Mr. Tennyson in Locksley Hall': "Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.” 58. The substitution of law for force has indeed altered the relations of the strong and the weak; the hardening or cooling down of political institutions and social traditions, the fixed and legal track instead of the open pathless field, have removed or neutralised many of those occasions and passages of life, which were formerly the schools of individual character. The genius of mechanism has vied, in the arts both of peace and war, with the strong hand, and has well-nigh robbed it of its place. But let us not be deceived by that smoothness of superficies, which the social prospect offers to the distant eye. Nearness dispels the illusion; life is still as full of deep, of varied, of ecstatic, of harrowing interests as it ever was. The heart of man still beats and bounds, exults and suffers, from causes which are only less salient and conspicuous, because they are more mixed and diversified. It still undergoes every phase of emotion, and even, as seems probable, with a susceptibility which has increased and is increasing, and which has its index and outer form in the growing delicacy and complexities of the nervous system. Does any one believe that ever at any time there was a greater number of deaths referable to that comprehensive cause, a broken heart? Let none fear that this age, or any coming one, will extirpate the material of poetry. The more reasonable apprehension might be lest it should sap the vital force necessary to handle that material, and mould it into appropriate forms. To those especially who cherish any such apprehension, we recommend the perusal of this volume. Of it we will say without fear, what we would not dare to say of any other recent work; that of itself it raises the character and the hopes of the age and the country which have produced it, and that its author, by his own single strength, has made a sensible addition to the permanent wealth of mankind. ADDRESS DELIVERED AT BURSLEM, STAFFORDSHIRE, OCTOBER 26, 1863.* 1. We have now, Ladies and Gentlemen, laid the foundation stone of a building which is destined, as I hope, to do honour, and to produce abundant benefit, to this town and neighbourhood. The occupations and demands of political life compel many of those who pursue it, and myself among the number, to make a rule of declining all invitations of a local character, except such as lie within their own immediate and personal sphere. But when I received, through one of your respected representatives, an invitation to co-operate with you in the foundation of the Wedgwood Institute, at the place which gave him birth, and on the site of what may, perhaps, be called his earliest factory, I could not hesitate to admit that a design of this kind was, at least in my view, not a local, but, when properly regarded, rather a national design. Partly it may be classed as national, because the manufacture of earthenware, in its varied and innumerable branches, is fast becoming, or has indeed become, one of our great and distinguishing British manufactures. But it is for another and a broader reason, that I desire to treat the purpose * London, John Murray, 1863. |