of the unseen and eternal.  Yet she was burdened constantly in this effort by the fact that she had a new theory of the spiritual and ideal side of life to interpret.  The poets who win the homage of mankind, and conquer all hearts to themselves, take the accepted interpretations of the great spiritual problems of life as the basis of their work and give those a larger, loftier meaning through their poetic and ideal insight and capacity of interpretation.  They shun theories which must be expounded and interpretations for which no one is prepared.  It is here George Eliot is seriously at fault as a poet, however much she may be commended as a teacher and reformer.  Perhaps the truest piece of poetic work she did was Agatha, in which, however, there is a greater reliance than in most of her poems, on the accepted interpretations of spiritual beliefs.  In portraying the trust, childlike and simple, of an old woman, and in endeavoring to realize the poetic elements of that trust and simplicity, she was very effective.  In such work as this she would have been much more successful, from the strictly poetic point of view, than she has been, if she had not attempted to give her theories a clothing in verse.  In her “Brother and Sister” she was also very successful, but especially so in the “Two Lovers.”  There is an exquisite charm and power in some of these minor poems.  Where the heart was free, and the intellect was not dominant and insistent on the importance of its theories, there was secured a genuine poetic beauty.  There is true poetry in these lines: 

Two lovers by a moss-grown spring: 
They lean soft cheeks together there,
Mingled the dark and sunny hair,
And heard the wooing thrushes sing. 
Oh budding time! 
Oh love’s blest prime!

Two wedded from the portal stept: 
The bells made happy carrollings,
The air was soft as passing wings,
White petals on the pathway slept. 
Oh pure-eyed bride! 
Oh tender pride!

There is a beauty and majesty in the poem on subjective immortality which is likely to make it, as it has already become, the one popular poem among all she wrote.  There is a stimulus, enthusiasm and abandon about it which is attained but seldom in her other verses.  The love of humanity, its passionate longing to sacrifice self for the good of all, is acceptable to much of the thought and purpose of the present time; and its spirit of sacrifice is one which may commend it to all earnest souls.  In the more extended poems there is genuine accomplishment just in proportion as the leading purpose was artistic rather than philosophic or moral.