George Eliot first began to write in verse, as was to be expected of one gifted with an imagination vigorous as hers.  Her love of music, her keen perception of the beauties of nature, her love of form and color, gave added attraction and impetus in the same direction.  That she did not continue through many years to write poetry seems to have been partly the result of her intense interest in severer studies.  The speculative cast of her mind predominated the poetical so nearly as to turn her away from the poetic side of life to find a solution for its graver and more intricate problems.  Her return to the poetic form of expression may be accounted for partly as the result of a greater confidence in her own powers which came from success, and partly from a desire for a new and richer medium of utterance.

So far as can be judged from the dates of her poems, as appended to many of them, “How Lisa Loved the King” was the earliest written.  This was written in the year of the publication of Romola, and was followed the next year by the first draft of The Spanish Gypsy.  The poetical mottoes of Felix Holt, however, were the first to be published; and not until these appeared did the public know of her poetic gifts. The Spanish Gypsy was not published until 1868, and “How Lisa Loved the King” appeared the following year.

The original mottoes in Felix Holt gave good hint of George Eliot’s poetic gifts.  They are solid with thought, pregnant with the ripe wisdom of daily experience, significant for dramatic expression, or notable for their humor.  They are rather heavy and ponderous in style, though sonorous in expression.  A stately tread, a largeness of expression, an air of weighty meaning, appear in nearly all these mottoes.  As a specimen of the more philosophic, the following will indicate the truthfulness of this description:—­

  Truth is the precious harvest of the earth,
  But once, when harvest waved upon a land,
  The noisome cankerworm and caterpillar,
  Locusts, and all the swarming, foul-born broods,
  Fastened upon it with swift, greedy jaws,
  And turned the harvest into pestilence,
  Until men said, What profits it to sow?

Her capacity for dramatic expression, in which a rich comprehension of life is included, may be seen in these lines: 

1ST CITIZEN.  Sir, there’s a hurry in the veins of youth
That makes a vice of virtue by excess.

2D CITIZEN.  What if the coolness of our tardier veins
Be loss of virtue?

1ST CITIZEN.  All things cool with time—­
The sun itself, they say, till heat shall find
A general level, nowhere in excess.

2D CITIZEN.  ’Tis a poor climax, to my weaker thought,
That future middlingness.

Wisdom alloyed with humor appears in another motto: 

“It is a good and soothfast saw;
Half-roasted never will be raw;
No dough is dried once more to meal. 
No crock new-shapen by the wheel;
You can’t turn curds to milk again
Nor Now, by wishing, back to Then;
And having tasted stolen honey,
You can’t buy innocence for money.”