That germ of kindness, in the womb
    Of mercy caught, did not expire;
    Outlives my guilt, outlives my doom,
    And friends me in the pit of fire.

The Neckan and The Forsaken Merman tell the tale of contemptuous unkindness and its enduring poison. A Picture at Newstead depicts the inexpiable evils wrought by violent wrong. Poor Matthias tells in a parable the cruelty, not less real because unconscious, of imperfect sympathy—­

    Human longings, human fears,
    Miss our eyes and miss our ears. 
    Little helping, wounding much,
    Dull of heart, and hard of touch,
    Brother man’s despairing sign
    Who may trust us to divine?

In Geist’s Grave, the “loving heart,” the “patient soul” of the dog-friend are made to “read their homily to man”; and the theme of the homily is still the same:  the preciousness of the love which outlives the grave.  But nowhere perhaps is his doctrine about the true divinity of love so exquisitely expressed as in The Good Shepherd with the Kid—­

    He saves the sheep, the goats He doth not save.
    So rang Tertullian’s sentence . . .
      . . . . .  But she sigh’d,
    The infant Church!  Of love she felt the tide
    Stream on her from her Lord’s yet recent grave. 
    And then she smiled; and in the Catacombs,
    With eye suffused but heart inspired true,
    On those walls subterranean, where she hid
    Her head ’mid ignominy, death, and tombs,
    She the Good Shepherd’s hasty image drew—­
    And on His shoulders not a lamb, a kid.

So much, then, for his Criticism of Life, as applied in and through his poems.  It is not easy to estimate, even approximately, the effect produced by a loved and gifted poet, who for thirty years taught an audience, fit though few, that the main concerns of human life were Truth, Work, and Love.  Those “two noblest of things, Sweetness and Light” (though heaven only knows what they meant to Swift), meant to him Love and Truth; and to these he added the third great ideal, Work—­patient, persistent, undaunted effort for what a man genuinely believes to be high and beneficent ends.  Such a “Criticism of Life,” we must all admit, is not unworthy of one who seeks to teach his fellow-men; even though some may doubt whether poetry is the medium best fitted for conveying it.

We must now turn our attention to his performances in the field of literary criticism; and we begin in the year 1853.  He had won the prize for an English poem at Rugby, and again at Oxford.  In 1849 he had published without his name, and had recalled, a thin volume, called The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems.  He had done the same with Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems in 1852.  The best contents of these two volumes were combined in Poems, 1853, and to this book he gave a Preface, which was