of _Middlemarch_; and these are
wrought into a work of lofty insight and imagination, along with a high
spiritual ardor and a supreme ethical purpose. In this novel, for the first
time, as Professor Dowden says, her poetical genius found adequate
expression, and in complete association with the non-poetical elements of
her nature.

XVII.

THE SPANISH GYPSY AND OTHER POEMS.

It was _The Spanish Gypsy_, published in 1868, which brought the name of
George Eliot before the public as a poet. This work is a novel written in
blank verse, with enough of the heroic and tragic in it to make the story
worthy of its poetic form. The story is an excellent one, well conceived
and worked out, and had it been given the prose form would have made a
powerful and original novel. While it would doubtless have gained in
definiteness of detail and clearness of purpose by being presented in the
prose form, yet its condensation into a poem is a gain, and the whole
setting of the story has been made of greater interest by this method of
expression. The poetic form is as original as are the theories of life
which the poem is designed to inculcate. In structure it combines, with a
method quite its own, the descriptive and dramatic forms of poetry. In this
it nearly approaches the method followed in her novels of combining
description and dialogue in a unitary structure of great strength and
perfection. The descriptive passages in her prose works are strong and
impressive, lofty in tone, and yet lovingly faithful in detail. Her
conversations are often highly dramatic and add greatly to the whole
outcome of these novels. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ the surroundings of the
story are first described in verse which, if not always perfectly poetic,
is yet imaginatively thought out and executed in a manner befitting the
subject. Suddenly, however, the narrative and descriptive form ceases and
the dramatic begins. By means also of full "stage directions" to the
dramatic portions of the poem, the story is wrought out quite as much in
detail as it needs to be; and much is gained of advantage over the length
of her novels by this concentration of scene and narrative. While the
narrative portion of the poem is much less in extent than the dramatic, yet
it has in it some of the main elements of the plot, and those without which
the action could not be worked out. The dramatic element gives it a real
and living power. The characters are strongly conceived