This would not be enough to make a permanent reputation if it stood alone; but there were moments in which he bounded into the first rank.  It would hardly be safe to call Kingsley a poet of great pretension, although there are passages in The Saint’s Tragedy and in the Ballads of real power; but he has written songs which, as songs for the voice, have hardly been surpassed by Tennyson himself. The Sands of Dee and The Three Fishers, if not poetry of quite perfect kind, have that incommunicable and indescribable element of the cantabile which fits them to the wail of a sympathetic voice perhaps even better than any songs of the most finished poetry.  A true song must be simple, familiar, musically suggestive of a single touching idea, and nothing more.  And this is just the mysterious quality of these songs and the source of their immense popularity.  Again, without pretending that Kingsley is a great novelist, there are scenes, especially descriptive scenes, in Hypatia, in Westward Ho! which belong to the very highest order of literary painting, and have hardly any superior in the romances of our era.  No romances, except Thackeray’s, have the same glow of style in such profusion and variety; and Thackeray himself was no such poet of natural beauty as Charles Kingsley—­a poet, be it remembered, who by sheer force of imagination could realise for us landscapes and climates of which he himself had no sort of experience.  Even Scott himself has hardly done this with so vivid a brush.

Kingsley was a striking example of that which is so characteristic of recent English literature—­its strong, practical, social, ethical, or theological bent.  It is in marked contrast with French literature.  Our writers are always using their literary gifts to preach, to teach, to promulgate a new social or religious movement, to reform somebody or something to illustrate a new doctrine.  From first to last, Carlyle regarded himself even more as preacher than as artist:  so does his follower, Mr. Ruskin.  Macaulay seemed to write history in order to prove the immeasurable superiority of the Whig to the Tory; and Froude and Freeman write history to enforce their own moral.  Disraeli’s novels were the programme of a party and the defence of a cause; and even Dickens and Thackeray plant their knives deep into the social abuses of their time.  Charles Kingsley was not professed novelist, nor professed man of letters.  He was novelist, poet, essayist, and historian, almost by accident, or with ulterior aims.  Essentially, he was a moralist, a preacher, a socialist, a reformer, and a theologian.