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in arrest of formal justice, is the motive of _The Sick King in Bokhara_; love, that wipes out sin, of _Saint Brandan_-- That germ of kindness, in the womb Of mercy caught, did not expire; Outlives my guilt, outlives my doom, And friends me in the pit of fire. _The Neckan_ and _The Forsaken Merman_ tell the tale of contemptuous unkindness and its enduring poison. _A Picture at Newstead_ depicts the inexpiable evils wrought by violent wrong. _Poor Matthias_ tells in a parable the cruelty, not less real because unconscious, of imperfect sympathy-- Human longings, human fears, Miss our eyes and miss our ears. Little helping, wounding much, Dull of heart, and hard of touch, Brother man's despairing sign Who may trust us to divine? In _Geist's Grave_, the "loving heart," the "patient soul" of the dog-friend are made to "read their homily to man"; and the theme of the homily is still the same: the preciousness of the love which outlives the grave. But nowhere perhaps is his doctrine about the true divinity of love so exquisitely expressed as in _The Good Shepherd with the Kid_-- _He saves the sheep, the goats He doth not save._ So rang Tertullian's sentence . . . . . . . . But she sigh'd, The infant Church! Of love she felt the tide Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave. And then she smiled; and in the Catacombs, With eye suffused but heart inspired true, On those walls subterranean, where she hid Her head 'mid ignominy, death, and tombs, She the Good Shepherd's hasty image drew-- And on His shoulders not a lamb, a kid. So much, then, for his Criticism of Life, as applied in and through his poems. It is not easy to estimate, even approximately, the effect produced by a loved and gifted poet, who for thirty years taught an audience, fit though few, that the main concerns of human life were Truth, Work, and Love. Those "two noblest of things, Sweetness and Light" (though heaven only knows what they meant to Swift), meant to him Love and Truth; and to these he added the third great ideal, Work--patient, persistent, undaunted effort for what a man genuinely believes to be high and beneficent ends. Such a "Criticism of Life," we must all admit, is not unworthy of one who seeks to teach his fellow-men; even though some may doubt whether poetry is the medium best fitted for conveying it. We must now turn our
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