has been shared by them all.  Buskin is a realist, Carlyle believed in the enduring realm of facts, and they have all accepted the spirit of naturalism which has ruled the century.  The scientific, philosophic and social theories of the time have been their inspiration.  Certain ideas about law, progress and social regeneration have affected them through and through.  Yet as regards the one great characteristic of idealism, all have widely departed from George Eliot, for all regard mind as supreme, all believe in a spiritual realm environing man.  This fact appears throughout their work.  To them the spiritual is objective; they are the true realists.  To George Eliot the spiritual is subjective, the result of our own feelings, to which it is limited.  When the feelings are gone, all is gone.  In the pages of these men there is consequently to be found a power and an inspiration not to be found in hers.  Wonderful as is her skill as an artist, and in the analysis of character, yet we feel that we are walking over mocking graves whenever we reach her spiritual conception of the world.  She deceives us with a shadow, offers us a name in place of what we crave for with every nobler instinct of the soul.  Our own feelings are given us, mirrored in the feelings of others, in place of the reality we desire to possess.

These men have linked their work with those spiritual convictions which have been the moral sustenance of the ages.  They have gained in strength and effectiveness thereby.  Tennyson has his many doubts, his teachings have been questioned; and yet he sings,—­

  “That each, who seems a separate whole,
    Should move his rounds, and passing all
    The skirts of self again, should fall,
  Remerging in the general soul,—­

  “Is faith as vague as all unsweet: 
    Eternal form shall still divide
    The eternal soul from all beside;
  And I shall know him when we meet.”

His flight of song is more sustained for this faith.  He is a truer poet, of stronger wing and loftier flight, because life has for him an infinite meaning, because he opens his mind to the impressions which come of man’s spiritual existence.  In the same way, Carlyle has a grander meaning running through his books, more of sublimity, a finer eloquence, because the spiritual is to him real.  Doubter and scorner as he was, he could not but see that man’s being reaches beyond the material world and interprets some higher realm.  Vague as that faith was with him, it was a source of the most effective literary power and stimulus.  He bursts forth, under its impulse, into impassioned passages of the noblest poetic beauty.

“Perhaps my father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near me, with me.  Both he and I are with God.  Perhaps, if it so please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one another, recognize one another.  As it is written, we shall be forever with God.  The possibility, nay (in some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows plainer to me.”