r Street," as some critics may--are among the
best of their kind; and scores of songs, snatches, etc., from "The Three
Fishers" and "The Starlings" of a very early date to the "When all the
world is young" ballad of the _Water Babies_ and the posthumous fragment
in rhyme of "Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorree"--one of the triumphs of that
pure poetry which has the minimum of meaning, yet enough--are of
extraordinary vigour, freshness, and charm.

But Kingsley was one of those darlings--perhaps the rarest--of the Muses
to whom they grant the gift not only of doing a little poetry
exquisitely, but the further gift of abstaining from doing anything ill;
and he seems to have recognised almost at once that "the other harmony,"
that of prose, was the one meant for him to do his day's work in. An
enthusiast for the people, and an eager disciple of Carlyle, he produced
in the fateful year 1849 two novels, _Alton Locke_ and _Yeast_, a little
crude, immature, and violent, but of wonderful power and beauty as
literature, and putting current ideas of Chartism, the Tractarian
movement, the woes of the working classes, and what not, with that most
uncommon touch which takes out of the expression all its ephemerality.
He had joined Maurice in the "Christian Socialist" movement, and was a
frequent newspaper writer in the same sense as that of his novels; while
he soon began to contribute to _Fraser's Magazine_ a series of extremely
brilliant essays, since collected in various forms, on literature,
scenery, sport (he was an ardent fisherman), and things in general. His
next novel, _Hypatia_, is still shot with Christian Socialism, but is
much less crude; and a further sobering down without any loss of force
appears in the great Elizabethan novel of _Westward Ho!_ usually, and
perhaps rightly, thought his masterpiece (1855). _Two Years Ago_ (1857),
the title of which refers to the Crimean War, is much more unequal, and
exhibits signs of a certain declension, though to a level still very
high. His last novel, _Hereward the Wake_ (1866), was and is very
variously judged.

But even the poems, the essays, and the novels, do not by any means fill
up the list of the results of Kingsley's activity. He was a constant,
and at his best a very good, sermon-writer for publication. He produced
in the first flush of the rage for seashore studies (1854) a very
pleasant little book called _Glaucus_; he collected some of his
historical lectures in _The Roman an