at little piece is surely a bit of pure and rare ballad poetry.

A _New Forest Ballad_ is also good, it ends thus--

They dug three graves in Lyndhurst yard;
They dug them side by side;
Two yeomen lie there, and a maiden fair,
A widow and never a bride.

So too is the _Outlaw_, whose last request is this:--

And when I'm taen and hangit, mither,
a brittling o' my deer,
Ye'll no leave your bairn to the corbie craws,
to dangle in the air;
But ye'll send up my twa douce brethren,
and ye'll steal me fra the tree,
And bury me up on the brown, brown muirs,
where I aye loved to be.

The famous ballad in _Yeast_ might have been a great success if Kingsley
would have limited it to five stanzas instead of twenty. What a ring
there is in the opening lines--

The merry brown hares came leaping
Over the crest of the hill--

If he could only have been satisfied with the first five stanzas what a
ballad it would have been!--If only he had closed it with the verse--

She thought of the dark plantation
And the hares, and her husband's blood,
And the voice of her indignation
Rose up to the throne of God.

That was enough for a ballad, but not for a political novel. The other
fifteen stanzas were required for his story; they may be vigorous
rhetoric, impressive moralising, but they are too argumentative and too
rhetorical to be ballad poetry. It is curious how much of Kingsley's
work, both poetry and prose, is inspired by his love of sport and his
indignation at game laws!

His songs, spoiled as they are to our ears by poor music and too often
maudlin voices, are as good songs and as fitted for singing as any in our
time. _The Sands of Dee_, hacknied and vulgarised as it is by the
banalities of the drawing-room, is really (to use a hacknied and
vulgarised phrase) a "haunting" piece of song; and though Ruskin may
pronounce "the cruel crawling foam" to be a false use of the pathetic
fallacy, the song, for what it professes to be, is certainly a thing to
live. I have always felt more kindly toward the East wind since
Kingsley's _Welcome, wild North-Easter_!; and his Church Hymns such
as--_Who will say the world is dying?_ and _The Day of the Lord is at
hand, at hand!_--are far above the level even of the better modern hymns.

We have not yet touched upon Kingsley's longest and most ambitious
poem--_The Saint's Tragedy_. With all its merits and beauties it