ation, such as, in a very crude form, had
prevailed all over Europe in his own childhood, but he conceived a wide
social activity for writers of verse. He foresaw that the Poet would 'bind
together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it
is spread over the whole earth, and over all time'. I suppose that in
composing those huge works, so full of scattered beauties, but in their
entirety so dry and solid, 'The Excursion' and 'The Prelude', he was
consciously attempting to inaugurate this scheme of a wide and
all-embracing social poetry. Nor do I suppose that efforts of this kind
will ever cease to be made. We have seen a gifted writer in whom the
memory is perhaps even more surprisingly developed than the imagination,
employ the stores of his experience to enrich a social poetry the elements
of which, _prima facie_, should be deeply attractive to us all. But I do
not know that the experiments of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, brilliant as they
are, are calculated to encourage the poets of the future to pursue their
lyric celebration of machinery and sociology and the mysteries of natural
religion. Already is it not that portion of his work which we approach
with most languor, in spite of its originality and its outlook upon 'the
vast empire of human society'? And lesser poets than he who seek for
popularity by such violent means are not, I think, rewarded by the
distinguished loyalty of the best readers. We are startled by their
novelty, and we admire them for the moment; but when, a few years later,
we return to them, we are apt to observe with distress how

their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.

If, therefore, I venture upon a prophecy, where all the greater prophets,
my predecessors, have failed, it is to suggest that the energy of future
poets will not be largely exercised on themes of this intrepid social
character, but that as civilization more and more tightly lays hold upon
literature, and excludes the purest form of it from one province after
another, poetry will, in its own defence, cultivate more and more what
Hazlitt calls 'a mere effusion of natural sensibility'. Hazlitt used the
phrase in derision, but we may accept it seriously, and not shrink from
adopting it. In most public remarks about current and coming literature in
the abstract, I marvel at the confidence with which it is taken for
granted that the sphere of interest occupied by writer