In links divine with the lyrical tongue is bound.
Pursue thy craft: it is music drawn of the fount
To spring perennial; well-spring is common ground.'

"And it follows that to one who believes in the teaching of earth so
whole-heartedly earth is not a painted back-cloth for man to strut against
and attitudinise, but a birth-place from which he cannot escape, and in
relation with which he must be considered, and must consider himself, on
pain of becoming absurd. Even:

"'His cry to heaven is a cry to her
He would evade.'

"She is a stern mother, be it understood, no coddling one:--

"'He may entreat, aspire,
He may despair, and she has never heed,
She, drinking his warm sweat, will soothe his need,
Not his desire.'

"When we neglect or misread her lessons, she punishes; at the best, she
offers no fat rewards to the senses, but--

"'The sense of large charity over the land;
Earth's wheaten of wisdom dispensed in the rough,
And a bell ringing thanks for a sustenance meal.'

"('Lean fare,' as the poet observes; and unpalatable, for instance, to our
Members of Parliament, to whom our Mr. Balfour one evening paid the
highest compliment within their range of apprehension by assuming that
quite a large number of them could write cheques for 69,000 pounds without
inconvenience.) At the best, too, she offers, with the loss of things we
have desired, a serene fortitude to endure their loss:--

"'Love born of knowledge, love that gains
Vitality as Earth it mates,
The meaning of the Pleasures, Pains,
The Life, the Death, illuminates.

"'For love we Earth, then serve we all;
Her mystic secret then is ours:
We fall, or view our treasures fall,
Unclouded--as beholds her flowers

"'Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,
Enrobed in morning's mounted fire,
When lowly, with a broken neck,
The crocus lays her cheek to mire.'

"But at least it is the true milk for man that she distils--

"'From her heaved breast of sacred common mould';

"The breast (to quote from another poem)--

"'Which is his well of strength, his home of rest,
And fair to scan.'

"And so Mr. Meredith, having diagnosed our disease, which is Self--
our 'distempered devil of Self,' gluttonous of its own enjoyments and
therefore necessarily a foe to law, which rests on temperance and
self-control--walks amo