m the
spiritual is objective; they are the true realists. To George Eliot the
spiritual is subjective, the result of our own feelings, to which it is
limited. When the feelings are gone, all is gone. In the pages of these men
there is consequently to be found a power and an inspiration not to be
found in hers. Wonderful as is her skill as an artist, and in the analysis
of character, yet we feel that we are walking over mocking graves whenever
we reach her spiritual conception of the world. She deceives us with a
shadow, offers us a name in place of what we crave for with every nobler
instinct of the soul. Our own feelings are given us, mirrored in the
feelings of others, in place of the reality we desire to possess.

These men have linked their work with those spiritual convictions which
have been the moral sustenance of the ages. They have gained in strength
and effectiveness thereby. Tennyson has his many doubts, his teachings have
been questioned; and yet he sings,--

"That each, who seems a separate whole,
Should move his rounds, and passing all
The skirts of self again, should fall,
Remerging in the general soul,--

"Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside;
And I shall know him when we meet."

His flight of song is more sustained for this faith. He is a truer poet, of
stronger wing and loftier flight, because life has for him an infinite
meaning, because he opens his mind to the impressions which come of man's
spiritual existence. In the same way, Carlyle has a grander meaning running
through his books, more of sublimity, a finer eloquence, because the
spiritual is to him real. Doubter and scorner as he was, he could not but
see that man's being reaches beyond the material world and interprets some
higher realm. Vague as that faith was with him, it was a source of the most
effective literary power and stimulus. He bursts forth, under its impulse,
into impassioned passages of the noblest poetic beauty.

"Perhaps my father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near
me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so please God, we
shall in some higher state of being meet one another, recognize one
another. As it is written, we shall be forever with God. The possibility,
nay (in some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows plainer
to me."

Ruskin has made it plain how necessary is that tone of mi