ng the secret that the
passage is from a poem."

_Do_ you hear the trumpet! There _is_ old Eamon's
blast. No bray but his can shake the air so well. He takes his
trumpeting as solemnly as _an_ angel charged to wake the
dead; thinks war was made for trumpeters, and _that_ their
great art _was_ made solely for themselves who understand
it. His features have all shaped themselves to blowing, and when
his trumpet _is either_ bagged or left at home he seems
_like_ a chattel in a broker's booth, a spoutless
watering-can, a promise to pay no sum particular!

George Eliot had not full command of poetic expression. This frequently
appears, not only in the fact that many lines are simply prose in thought,
but in the defects of the poetic form. Some lines are too short and others
too long, some having four and some six feet. An instance of the former is
to be found in these words between Don Silva and the Prior, forming one
line:

Strong reasons, father.
Ay, but good?

Of the latter:

And starry flashing steel and pale vermilion.

Still more suggestive are the expedients she resorts to in order to
complete the line. Lopez is made to say,--

Santiago! Juan, thou art hard to please.
I speak not for my own delighting, I.
I can be silent, I.

Very near this, Lopez is spoken of in this line:

That was not what he drew his sword at--he!

Such defects as these are not, certainly, of vital importance, and may
doubtless be found in even the greatest poets; but they are noticeable here
because of one texture with that which limits the quality of her poetic
art. The principal criticism to be made on her poetry is that it was
composed and did not create itself out of a full poetic mind. It was
wrought out, was the result of study and composition, is wanting in
spontaneity and enthusiasm. The most serious defect of her poetry is also
the most marked defect of her prose, and this is a want of the ideal
element. She was a realist by nature, and could not free herself from the
tendency to look at the world on its surface only.

In her poetry George Eliot is much more a _doctrinaire_ than in her novels.
All her poems, except a few of the shorter ones, are devoted to the
inculcation of some moral or philosophic teaching. The very effort she was
obliged to make to give herself utterance in poetry predisposed her to
intellectual subjects and those of a contr