He dwells not with you dead, but lives as Law.

For her ideas about resignation we must turn to the pages of The Mill on the Floss and Romola, for those about heredity and the past to The Spanish Gypsy and Daniel Deronda; but in these shorter poems she has completely unfolded the positivist conception, as she accepted it, of death and immortality.  The degree to which she was moved and inspired by this belief in an immortality in humanity is seen in the greater ardor and poetic merit of these poems than any others she wrote.

It is interesting to note that she introduces music into “The Legend of Jubal” and “Armgart”.  It was the art she most loved.  She even said that if she could possess the power most satisfactory to her heart, it would be that of making music the instrument of the homage which the great performers secure.  Yet she teaches in “Armgart” that there is a power higher than this, the power of affectionate service.  Her books are full of the praise of music.  She makes Maggie Tulliver express her own delight in it.

“I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.  It seems to infuse strength into my limbs, and ideas into my brain.  Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.”

In Adam Bede she becomes most poetic when extolling the power of exquisite music to work on the soul.

To feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life wherein memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being, past and present, in one unspeakable vibration, melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love, that has been scattered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learnt lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy.

In the “Minor Prophet” is to be found George Eliot’s theory of progress.  That poem also repeats her faith in common humanity, and gives new emphasis to her joy in the common toils and affections of men.  In the “College Breakfast Party” and “Self and Life,” her thoughts take a more truly philosophic form than in any of her other poems, but the first of these is the poorest piece of poetic work she gave to the public.  Nothing new in the way of teaching appears in these or her other poems.

George Eliot is the poet of positivism.  What is beautiful, touching and inspiring in that conception of the world she has sung, and in as poetic a manner as that philosophy is ever likely to inspire.  Her poetry is full of the thoughts and sentiments of the time.  It reflects the mood of her generation.  Prof.  Sidney Colvin has truly said that “there is nothing in the literature of the day so rousing—­to the mind of the day there is scarcely anything so