nd
in the tamarisks, and the fitful mutter of musketry-fire leagues
away to the left. A native woman from some unseen hut began to sing,
the mail train thundered past on its way to Delhi, and a roosting
crow cawed drowsily."

Abundant and vivid use of metaphors serves to render his concreteness
more varied and impressive. We find these in such expressions as "the
velvet darkness," "the kiss of the rain," "the tree-road." His
celestial artists splash at a ten-league canvas "with brushes of
comet's hair." Five words from Mulvaney explain why he does not wish
to leave his tent: "'Tis rainin' intrenchin' tools outside."

Kipling's spirit is essentially masculine. He prefers to write of men,
work, and battle, rather than of women and love. Since his interest is
mainly in action, he shows small ability in character drawing. His
people are clear-cut and alive, but we do not see them grow and
develop as do George Eliot's characters.

Above all, he stands as the interpreter of the ideals and the
interests of the Anglo-Saxons of his time. Those tendencies of the
age, which seem to others so dangerously materialistic, are the very
causes of his zest in life. In an age of machinery, he writes of the
romance of steam, the soul of an engine, the flight of an airship.

His is a work-a-day world; but in work well done, in obedience to the
established law, and in courage, he sees the proving of manhood, the
test of the true gentleman--

"Who had done his work and held his peace and had no fear to die."

Underlying all his thought is a deep belief in the "God of our
fathers," a God just to punish or reward, whom the English have
reverenced through all their history. Linked with this faith is an
intense feeling of patriotism toward that larger England of his
imperialistic vision.

These qualities justly brought Kipling the 1907 Nobel prize for
idealism in literature. He is truly the idealist of a practical age,
teaching the romance, the joy, the vision in the common facts and
virtues of present-day life.

SUMMARY

The history and literature of the Victorian age show the influence of
science. Darwin's conception of evolution affected all fields of
thought. The tendency toward analysis and dissection is a result of
scientific influence.

In describing the prose of the Victorian age, we have considered the
work of thirteen writers; namely, Macaulay, the brilliant essayist and
historian of the material advancement of E