nt, the songs
of Miss Ingelow began, and had instant and merited popularity. They
sprang up suddenly and tunefully as skylarks from the daisy-spangled,
hawthorn-bordered meadows of old England, with a blitheness long
unknown, and in their idyllic underflights moved with the tenderest
currents of human life. Miss Ingelow may be termed an idyllic lyrist,
her lyrical pieces having always much idyllic beauty. _High Tide,
Winstanley, Songs of Seven, and the Long White Seam_ are lyrical
treasures, and the author especially may be said to evince that
sincerity which is poetry's most enduring warrant."

_Winstanley_ is especially full of pathos and action. We watch this
heroic man as he builds the lighthouse on the Eddystone rocks:--

"Then he and the sea began their strife,
And worked with power and might:
Whatever the man reared up by day
The sea broke down by night.

* * * * *

"A Scottish schooner made the port
The thirteenth day at e'en:
'As I am a man,' the captain cried,
'A strange sight I have seen;

"'And a strange sound heard, my masters all,
At sea, in the fog and the rain,
Like shipwrights' hammers tapping low,
Then loud, then low again.

"'And a stately house one instant showed,
Through a rift, on the vessel's lea;
What manner of creatures may be those
That build upon the sea?'"

After the lighthouse was built, Winstanley went out again to see his
precious tower. A fearful storm came up, and the tower and its builder
went down together.

Several books have come from Miss Ingelow's pen since 1863. The
following year, Studies for Stories was published, of which the
Athenaeum said, "They are prose poems, carefully meditated, and
exquisitely touched in by a teacher ready to sympathize with every joy
and sorrow." The five stories are told in simple and clear language,
and without slang, to which she heartily objects. For one so rich
in imagination as Miss Ingelow, her prose is singularly free from
obscurity and florid language.

_Stories told to a Child_ was published in 1865, and _A Story of Doom,
and Other Poems_, in 1868, the principal poem being drawn from the
time of the Deluge. _Mopsa the Fairy_, an exquisite story, followed a
year later, with _A Sister's Bye-hours_, and since that time, _Off the
Skelligs_ in 1872, _Fated to be Free_ in 1875, _Sarah de Berenger_
in 1879, _Don John_ in 1881, and _Poems of the O