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Good and Evil has a large leaven of Grief always fermenting in 

 his soul. The meeting of actual humanity with its ideal — this 

 is indeed melancholy to behold, nothing could be more depressing 

 to a supersensitive soul such as many of our poets have possessed. 

 " The poetic temperament, half-way between the light of the 

 ideal and the darkness of the real and rendered by each more 

 sensitive to the other, and unable without a struggle to pass out 

 clear and calm into either, bears the impress of the necessary 

 conflict in dust and blood," (Mrs. Browning.) The same 

 characteristic has distinguished almost every reformer, from 

 Moses downwards (See Bacon's Essay). Russell Lowell thus 

 prefaces his latest work, " Heartsease and Rue " ; — 



' Along the wayside where we pass bloom few 



' Gay plants of heartsease, more of saddening rue ; 



' So life is mingled ; so should poems be 



' That speak a conscious word to you and me. 



There is something of sadness in "Locksley Hall," e.g. the 

 comparison of a hungry people to a lion slowly creeping nigher, 

 but yet how Tennyson in the same poem warms when he sees 

 the " Vision of the world and all the wonder that shall be — the 

 heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails dropping 

 down with costly bales," the war-drum silent and the battle flags 

 furled. We hear much from our poets of "the still sad music 

 of humanity." They have majestic sorrow, but it is " mingled 

 with uncomplaining trust." Possessing in the highest perfection 

 the gift of imagination they pierce beyond the passing fancy of 

 the times, they fulfil to some extent the office of seers in these 

 later days ; (" 'twas surely prophetic that the name of prophet 

 and of poet was the same " ;) what is hidden from others is 

 revealed to them, and they are never so happy, never so fitly 

 exercising their high vocation, never more truly poets, than when 

 with the vision and faculty divine they tell us of the claims of our 

 own age, or look forward to the more glorious future. The vision 

 of a Golden Age has never been lost. Some of the old writers did 

 indeed "push the happy season back." But there never have 

 been long wanting those who, like Bacon, have given the rein to 

 their imagination and pictured the world as it would be when a 

 true philosophy (to use his own splendid phrase) " should have 

 enlarged the bounds of human empire." The nobihty of their 

 imaginations has been fully recognised in these later ages when 

 many parts of their predictions have been accomplished, even 

 according to the letter, and the whole, construed according to the 

 spirit, are daily accomplishing all around us. Those who speak 

 of the golden year as being in the past, and those who push the 

 season forwards, the Laureate calls " dreamers both," and this 

 is the lesson he gives to us 19th century men : — " Well I know 

 that unto him who works, and feels he works, this same grand 



