as no such poet of
natural beauty as Charles Kingsley--a poet, be it remembered, who by
sheer force of imagination could realise for us landscapes and climates
of which he himself had no sort of experience. Even Scott himself has
hardly done this with so vivid a brush.

Kingsley was a striking example of that which is so characteristic of
recent English literature--its strong, practical, social, ethical, or
theological bent. It is in marked contrast with French literature. Our
writers are always using their literary gifts to preach, to teach, to
promulgate a new social or religious movement, to reform somebody or
something to illustrate a new doctrine. From first to last, Carlyle
regarded himself even more as preacher than as artist: so does his
follower, Mr. Ruskin. Macaulay seemed to write history in order to prove
the immeasurable superiority of the Whig to the Tory; and Froude and
Freeman write history to enforce their own moral. Disraeli's novels were
the programme of a party and the defence of a cause; and even Dickens and
Thackeray plant their knives deep into the social abuses of their time.
Charles Kingsley was not professed novelist, nor professed man of
letters. He was novelist, poet, essayist, and historian, almost by
accident, or with ulterior aims. Essentially, he was a moralist, a
preacher, a socialist, a reformer, and a theologian.

To begin with his poetry, and he himself began his literary career with
verses at the age of sixteen, he began to write poetry almost as a child,
and some of his earlier verses are his best. If Kingsley, with all his
literary gifts, was never quite in the first rank in anything, he came
nearest to being a poet of mark. Some of his ballads almost touch the
high-water mark of true ballad poetry, with its abrupt fierce blows of
tragedy and pathos, its simple touches of primitive rude speech, its
reserve of force, its unspoken mysteries. At any rate, Kingsley's best
ballads have no superior in the ballads of the Victorian era in lilt, in
massiveness of stroke, in strange unexpected turns. _The Weird Lady_ is
an astonishing piece for a lad of twenty-one--it begins with, "The
swevens came up round Harold the Earl, Like motes in the sunnes
beam"--and it ends with the stanza:

A white dove out of the coffin flew;
Earl Harold's mouth it kist;
He fell on his face, wherever he stood;
And the white dove carried his soul to God
Or ever the bearers wist.

Th