19 
Down to the mothers, as Faust went, I go, to the roots 
of our manhood. 
Mothers of us in our cradles ; of us once more in our 
glory. 
New-born, body and soul, in the great pure world which 
shall be 
In the renewing of all things, when man shall return 
to his Eden —— 
No doubt evil and cruelty must be looked in the face. 
But there are lines in ‘‘ Saint Maura’’ which have no 
counterpart in the Evangelists’ narrative of the Passion. 
Spots of cruelty are suddenly focussed. In the Prologue 
all that has been passed through and left behind. 
Kingsley’s simple faith shines again, but not in bare 
simplicity. He has been down to the dark caves of life and 
-returns enriched with painful, but now calmed experience. 
And Kingsley is best in his simplicity ; that is his 
innermost self. In nature he sought the will of God 
humbly and confessed that it was sometimes hard to 
discern, but he never doubted it was there. A poem called 
** Palinodia,’’ dated 1841 (which is a touching commentary 
on ‘‘ The Tide River ’’), shews that in early Cambridge 
days his faith had suffered some eclipse. But through the 
rest of his life he had no divided mind in that respect. In 
another matter he had. When he was Professor of History 
at Cambridge he lectured on ‘‘ The Roman and the Teuton.”’ 
_ That title indicates how his affections were drawn in two 
directions. He was full of admiration for the strong new 
life of progress that came in with the Teutonic nations. Yet 
he could not but regret the majesty of Rome, and the art 
of Hellas which Rome inherited. The romantic or the 
_classical? He could not give up either. Yet he was more 
for the romantic. "That was in his very bones. That was 
more than a taste with him. . It was part of that essential 
_. force in him which burst into spontaneous expression in 
his famous ‘‘ Ode to the North-east Wind :”’ 
Come ; and strong within us 
Stir the Vikings’ blood ; 
Bracing bone and sinew ; 
Blow, thou wind of God! 
And it was even more than that. ‘The name of God is 
not introduced at random into the lines just quoted. 
Kingsley might please himself with the fancy of a ‘‘ youth 
of the world,”’ in which 
Men still faced this fair creation 
With humour, heart, imagination, 
but he seriously believed that the break up of the old 
