True, the best part of him, perhaps almost all the good part of him, spent itself in words, and must be looked for, not in his life, but in his books.  But in those books it can be found; and if you look through them, you will see that he has not touched upon a subject without taking, on the whole, the right, and pure, and lofty view of it.  Howsoever extravagant he may be in his notions of poetic licence, that licence is never with him a synonym for licentiousness.  Whatever is tender and true, whatever is chivalrous and high-minded, he loves at first sight, and reproduces it lovingly.  And it may be possible that his own estimate of his poems was not altogether wrong; that his words may have awakened here and there in others a love for that which is morally as well as physically beautiful, and may have kept alive in their hearts the recollection that, both for the bodies and the souls of men forms of life far nobler and fairer than those which we see now are possible; that they have appeared, in fragments at least, already on the earth; that they are destined, perhaps, to reappear and combine themselves in some ideal state, and in

         “One far-off divine event,
  Toward which the whole creation moves.”

This is the special and proper function of the poet; that he may do this, does God touch his lips with that which, however it may be misused, is still fire from off the altar beneath which the spirits of his saints cry,—­“Lord, how long?” If he “reproduce the beautiful” with this intent, however so little, then is he of the sacred guild.  And because Vavasour had this gift, therefore he was a poet.

But in this he was weak:  that he did not feel, or at least was forgetting fast, that this gift had been bestowed on him for any practical purpose.  No one would demand that he should have gone forth with some grand social scheme, to reform a world which looked to him so mean and evil.  He was not a man of business, and was not meant to be one.  But it was ill for him that in his fastidiousness and touchiness he had shut himself out from that world, till he had quite forgotten how much good there was in it as well as evil; how many people—­commonplace and unpoetical it may be—­but still heroical in God’s sight, were working harder than he ever worked, at the divine drudgery of doing good, and that in dens of darkness and sloughs of filth, from which he would have turned with disgust; so that the sympathy with the sinful and fallen which marks his earlier poems, and which perhaps verges on sentimentalism, gradually gives place to a Pharisaic and contemptuous tone; a tone more lofty and manful in seeming, but far less divine in fact.  Perhaps comparative success had injured him.  Whilst struggling himself against circumstances, poor, untaught, unhappy, he had more fellow-feeling, with those whom circumstance oppressed.  At least, the pity which he could once bestow upon the misery which he met in his daily walks, he now kept for the more picturesque woes of Italy and Greece.