mbstone: "Life is but a little holding, lent
to do a mighty labor."

Poetry.--During his long career, Meredith wrote much verse, which
was collected in 1912 in a volume of 578 pages.

The quality of his poetry is very uneven. In such exquisite poems as
_Love in the Valley_, _The Lark Ascending_, and _Melanthus_, the fancy
and melody are artistically intertwined. Many have admired the
felicity of the description and the romance of the sentiment in this
stanza from _Love in the Valley_:--

"Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,
Swift as the swallow along the river's light
Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets,
Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.
Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops,
Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun,
She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer,
Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!"

Some of his songs are pure music, and an occasional descriptive
passage in his verse shows the deftness of touch of a skilled lyrical
poet. Such poems as _Jump-to-Glory Jane_, _Juggling Jerry_, _The
Beggar's Soliloquy_, and _The Old_ _Chartist_, are character sketches
of humble folk and show genuine pathos and humor. In his poetry,
Meredith is, however, more often the moralist and philosopher than the
singer and simple narrator. He treats of love, life, and death as
metaphysical problems. He ponders over the duties of mankind and the
greatest sources of human strength and courage. He roams through a
region that seems timeless and spaceless. He "neighbors the
invisible." The obscurities in many of these poems are due to the
abstract nature of the subject matter, to excessive condensation of
thought, to frequent omission of connecting words, and to an abundance
of figurative language.

Novels.--Meredith's novels comprise the largest and most noteworthy
part of his writings. His most important works of fiction are _The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ (1859), _The Egoist_ (1879), and _Diana of
the Crossways_ (1885). _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ is the story of
a beautiful first love. The courtship of Richard and Lucy, amid scenes
that inspire poetic descriptions, is in itself a true prose lyric.
Their parting interview is one of the most powerfully handled chapters
to be found in English novels. It is heart-rending in its emotional
intensity and almost faultless in expression. _The Ordeal of Richard
Feverel_, like most of Meredith