ation because she could herself believe, with
simple trust, what she has embodied in "A Child's Thought of God."

"God is so good, He wears a fold
Of heaven and earth across his face--
Like secrets kept, for love, untold.
But still I feel that his embrace
Slides down by thrills, through all things made,
Through sight and sound of every place."

That art is to be nothing more than a copying and interpretation of nature
Mrs. Browning did not believe. In _Aurora Leigh_ she says,--

"Art's the witness of what is
Beyond this show. If this world's show were all,
Mere imitation would be all in art."

The glow of genius burns up out of all her pages, and there is an aroma and
a subtle power in them which comes alone of this conception of art. She
could not rest content with the little round of man's experience, but found
that all the universe is bound together and all its parts filled with a
God-spirit.

"No lily-muffled hum of a summer bee
But finds some coupling with, the spinning stars;
No pebble at your foot but proves a sphere;
No chaffinch but implies the cherubim:
... Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God."

That is a larger faith and a truer faith than appears anywhere in the pages
of George Eliot, and it is one which impregnates most of the best
literature the world posseses with light and life. It is a faith which
gives hope and impulse where the other saddens and unnerves.

There is wanting in George Eliot's books that freshness of spirit, that
faith in the future, and that peaceful poise of soul which is to be found
in the writings of Tennyson, Ruskin and Mrs. Browning. Even with all his
constitutional cynicism and despair, the teachings of Carlyle are much more
hopeful than hers. An air of fatigue and world-weariness is about all her
work, even when it is most stimulating with its altruism. Though in theory
not a pessimist, yet a sense of pain and sorrow grows out of the touch of
each of her books. In this she missed one of the highest uses of
literature, to quicken new hopes and to awaken nobler purposes. There is a
tone of joy and exultation in the power life confers, an instinctive sense
of might to conquer the world, in the best writing. To make men think, to
move men to action, to confer finer feelings and motives, is the power of
the true poet. When he does not accomplish this he has written to a lesser
purpose. Literature aims e