at the
lower instincts of our humanity are ever urging us all to seek--ease and
release from the ceaseless struggle against wrong, the ceaseless
straining on toward right. "In Memoriam" is the record of love "making
perfect through suffering:" struggling on through the valley of the
shadow of death toward the far-off, faith-seen light "behind the veil."
"The Vision of Sin" portrays to us humanity choosing enjoyment as its
only aim; and of necessity sinking into degradation so profound, that
even the large heart and clear eye of the poet can but breathe out in sad
bewilderment, "Is there any hope?"--can but dimly see, far off over the
darkness, "God make Himself an awful rose of dawn." In one of the most
profound of all His creations--"The Palace of Art"--we have presented to
us the soul surrounding itself with everything fair and glad, and in
itself pure, not primarily to the eye, but to the mind: attempting to
achieve its destiny and to fulfil its life in the perfections of
intellectual beauty and aesthetic delight. But the palace of art, _made
the palace of the soul_, becomes its dungeon-house, self-generating and
filling fast with all loathsome and deathly shapes; and the heaven of
intellectual joy becomes at last a more penetrative and intenser hell.
The "Idylls of the King" are but exquisite variations on the one
note--that the only true and high life of humanity is the life of full
and free obedience; and that such life on earth becomes of necessity one
of struggle, sorrow, outward loss and apparent failure. In "Vivien"--the
most remarkable of them all for the subtlety of its conception and the
delicacy of its execution,--the picture is perhaps the darkest and
saddest time can show--that of a nature rich to the utmost in all lower
wisdom of the mind, struggling long and apparently truly against the
flesh, yet all the while dallying with the foul temptation, till the
flesh prevails; and in a moment, swift and sure as the lightning, moral
and spiritual death swoops down, and we see the lost one no more.

Many other illustrations might be given from our noblest and truest
poetry--from the works of the Brownings, the "Saints' Tragedy" of Charles
Kingsley, the dramatic poems of Henry Taylor--of the extent to which it
is vitally, even where not formally Christian; the extent to which the
truth of the Cross has transfused it, and become one chief source of its
depth and power. But we must hasten on to our more immedi