18 
Darker and darker the further I go, 
Baser and baser the richer I grow ; 
Who dare sport with the sin-defiled ? 
Shrink from me, turn from me, mother and child. 
Strong and free, strong and free, 
The floodgates are open, away to the sea. 
Free and strong, free and strong, 
Cleansing my streams as I hurry along 
To the golden sands, and the leaping bar, 
And the taintless tide that awaits me afar, 
As I lose myself in the infinite main, 
Like a soul that has sinned and is pardoned again. 
Undefiled, for the undefiled ; 
Play by me, bathe in me, mother and child. 
This reverence for fruitful life was the main reason for 
Kingsley’s too prejudiced criticism of the religious life of 
the middle ages. He saw in the exaltation of the unmarried 
over the married state almost a blasphemy against God who 
reveals Himself in teeming nature, and has consecrated 
nature in the family. ‘‘ The earth seems one vast bride- 
bed. Doth God tempt us?” says S. Elizabeth in ‘‘ The 
Saint’s Tragedy.’’ That question and the difficulties which 
were cruelly arrayed against her search for a right answer 
to it, set the course of her tragedy. It is a good drama, 
and in his dramatic imagination Kingsley is fair to both 
sides. It is not dishonesty of which he accuses the 
medizeval churchmen. Far more does he feel indignant 
pity at their pathetic, unavoidable blindness to the holier 
truth. In another dramatic piece—not a play but a 
dramatic idyll as it might be styled—‘‘Saint Maura,’’ he goes 
back to a more primitive era of the Church, when a deacon 
might be married and suffer martyrdom with his young 
wife. It is a powerful stream of rhetoric, all the’ more 
powerful for its restraint. But it is horrible—the woman 
speaking from the cross where she has hung through one 
day and will live and hang two days more. Kingsley’s 
unadorned style makes it too real to be borne. Better art, 
as it seems to me, and therefore nearer to essential truth, is 
a fragment of a prologue which he began to write for 
** Saint Maura.’’ It stands apart from it in the collected 
poems with the title ‘‘ Down to the Mothers.”’ 
Drop back awhile through the years, to the warm rich 
youth of the nations, 
Childlike in virtue and faith, though childlike in 
passion and pleasure, 
Childlike still, and still near to their God, while the 
day-spring of Eden 
Lingered in rose-red rays on the peaks of Ionian 
mountains. 
