Novelists of strong imagination and a ready command of expressive words, barely escape writing poetry when they only purpose to write prose.  This is true of Hugo, Auerbach, Dickens and George Eliot, again and again.  The glow of creation, the high-wrought impulse of imagination, the ideal conception of life, all move the novelist in the direction of poetry.  With much effort he keeps meter and rhyme out of his prose, but simile and metaphor, condensed expression, unusual words, poetic compounds, alliteration, sublime and picturesque expression, will intrude themselves.  Dickens even permits meter and rhyme to conquer him, and weakens his style in consequence.  He grows sentimental, and the real strength of pure prose is lost.  George Eliot is often poetical in expression, touches the very borders of poetry continually, but she seldom permits herself to lapse from the strong, energetic and impressive prose which she almost uniformly writes.  Specimens of this noble poetic-prose may be found very often in her pages.  While it would be difficult by any transposition of words to turn it into poetry, as may often be done in the case of Dickens’s prose, yet it contains most of the elements of a high order of poetry.  In the account of the death of Maggie and Tom is to be found a fine specimen of her style, the last words being good iambics.

The boat reappeared, but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted; living through again, in one supreme moment, the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together.

In the first paragraph of the thirty-third chapter of Adam Bede is a sentence which makes a successful stanza in iambics by the addition of a single word.

  The woods behind the chase,
  And all the hedgerow trees,
  Took on a solemn splendor then
  Under the dark low-hanging skies.

It is very seldom, however, that George Eliot permits anything like meter in her prose, and she is usually very reticent of rhythm.  There is fervor and enthusiasm, imagination and poetic insight, but all kept within the limits of robust and manly prose.  This capacity of prose to serve most of the purposes of poetry may be seen in a marked degree in all of George Eliot’s novels.  In the account of Adam Bede’s love for Hetty this subtle power of words and ideas to give the charm and impression of poetry without rhythm or rhyme is exhibited in a characteristic manner.

I think the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded, blossom-like, dark-eyed Hetty, of whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came out of the very strength of his nature, and not out of any inconsistent weakness.  Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music? to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and binding