o
convert the moor into the field, as the field into the rich and gorgeous
garden. The imperfect _nisus_ which might be remarked in some former
works has at length reached the fulness of dramatic energy: in the
Idylls we have nothing vague or dreamy to complain of: everything lives
and moves, in the royal strength of nature: the fire of Prometheus has
fairly caught the clay: every figure stands clear, broad, and sharp
before us, as if it had sky for its background: and this of small as
well as great, for even the "little novice" is projected on the canvas
with the utmost truth and vigour, and with that admirable effect in
heightening the great figure of Guinevere, which Patroclus produces for
the character of Achilles, and (as some will have it) the modest
structure of Saint Margaret's for the giant proportions of Westminster
Abbey. And this, we repeat, is the crowning gift of the poet: the power
of conceiving and representing man.

We do not believe that a Milton--or, in other words, the writer of a
"Paradise Lost"--could ever be so great as a Shakespeare or a Homer,
because (setting aside all other questions) his chief characters are
neither human, nor can they be legitimately founded upon humanity; and,
moreover, what he has to represent of man is, by the very law of its
being, limited in scale and development. Here at least the saying is a
true one: _Antiquitas saeculi, juventus mundi;_ rendered by our poet in
"The Day-dream,"

For we are ancients of the earth,
And in the morning of the times.

The Adam and Eve of Paradise exhibit to us the first inception of our
race; and neither then, nor after their first sad lesson, could they
furnish those materials for representation, which their descendants have
accumulated in the school of their incessant and many-coloured, but on
the whole too gloomy, experience. To the long chapters of that
experience every generation of man makes its own addition. Again we ask
the aid of Mr. Tennyson in "Locksley Hall":--

Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.

The substitution of law for force has indeed altered the relations of
the strong and the weak; the hardening or cooling down of political
institutions and social traditions, the fixed and legal track instead of
the open pathless field, have removed or neutralised many of those
occasions and passages of life, which were formerly t