Do you hear the trumpet!  There is old Eamon’s blast.  No bray but his can shake the air so well.  He takes his trumpeting as solemnly as an angel charged to wake the dead; thinks war was made for trumpeters, and that their great art was made solely for themselves who understand it.  His features have all shaped themselves to blowing, and when his trumpet is either bagged or left at home he seems like a chattel in a broker’s booth, a spoutless watering-can, a promise to pay no sum particular!

George Eliot had not full command of poetic expression.  This frequently appears, not only in the fact that many lines are simply prose in thought, but in the defects of the poetic form.  Some lines are too short and others too long, some having four and some six feet.  An instance of the former is to be found in these words between Don Silva and the Prior, forming one line: 

  Strong reasons, father. 
                              Ay, but good?

Of the latter: 

  And starry flashing steel and pale vermilion.

Still more suggestive are the expedients she resorts to in order to complete the line.  Lopez is made to say,—­

  Santiago!  Juan, thou art hard to please. 
  I speak not for my own delighting, I.
  I can be silent, I.

Very near this, Lopez is spoken of in this line: 

  That was not what he drew his sword at—­he!

Such defects as these are not, certainly, of vital importance, and may doubtless be found in even the greatest poets; but they are noticeable here because of one texture with that which limits the quality of her poetic art.  The principal criticism to be made on her poetry is that it was composed and did not create itself out of a full poetic mind.  It was wrought out, was the result of study and composition, is wanting in spontaneity and enthusiasm.  The most serious defect of her poetry is also the most marked defect of her prose, and this is a want of the ideal element.  She was a realist by nature, and could not free herself from the tendency to look at the world on its surface only.

In her poetry George Eliot is much more a doctrinaire than in her novels.  All her poems, except a few of the shorter ones, are devoted to the inculcation of some moral or philosophic teaching.  The very effort she was obliged to make to give herself utterance in poetry predisposed her to intellectual subjects and those of a controversial nature.  For this reason her verse has a special interest for those who are attracted to her teachings.  Her pen was freer, more creative, in her great novels than in her poems.  In fact, her novels, especially Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, are much more poetical than much she did in verse.  In her verse she tried to present the more spiritual side of life, to make living and effective her own conceptions