which revived that memory.  Reverently let it be said of this mature spiritual need that it was akin to the boy’s and girl’s picturing of the future beloved; but the stirrings of such young desire are feeble compared with the passionate current of an ideal life straining to embody itself, made intense by resistance to imminent dissolution.  The visionary form became a companion and auditor, keeping a place not only in the waking imagination, but in those dreams of lighter slumber of which it is truest to say, “I sleep, but my heart is awake”—­when the disturbing trivial story of yesterday is charged with the impassioned purpose of years. [Footnote:  Daniel Deronda, chapter XXXVIII.]

Many times in her prose George Eliot has recognized the true character of poetry, and she has even given definitions of it which show how well she knew its real nature.  She makes Will Ladislaw say that—­

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—­a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. [Footnote:  Middlemarch, chapter XXII.]

She thinks poetry and romance are as plentiful in the world as ever they were, that they exist even amidst the conditions created by invention and science; and if we do not find them there it is only because poetry and romance are absent from our own minds.  If we have not awe and tenderness, wonder and enthusiasm, poetry cannot come near us, and we shall not be thrilled and exalted by it. [Footnote:  Daniel Deronda, chanter XIX.] Yet it is not difficult to see that George Eliot is not a poet in the fullest sense, because hers is not thoroughly and always a poetic mind, because she reasons about things too much.  The poet is impressed, moved, thrilled and exalted, and pours out his song from his feelings and transfused with emotion.  George Eliot was given to speculation, loved exactness of expression, and kept too close to the real.  She had not that lightness of touch, that deftness and flexibility of expression, and that versatility of imaging forth her ideas, which the real poet possesses.  Her mind moved with a ponderous tread, which needed a prose style large and stately as its true medium of expression.  While she had poetic ideas in abundance, and an imaginative discernment of nature and life, she had not the full gift of poetic speech.  She lacked inspiration as well as flexibility of thought, her imagination was not sufficiently rich, and she had not the full sense of rhythmic harmony.