To begin with his poetry, and he himself began his literary career with verses at the age of sixteen, he began to write poetry almost as a child, and some of his earlier verses are his best.  If Kingsley, with all his literary gifts, was never quite in the first rank in anything, he came nearest to being a poet of mark.  Some of his ballads almost touch the high-water mark of true ballad poetry, with its abrupt fierce blows of tragedy and pathos, its simple touches of primitive rude speech, its reserve of force, its unspoken mysteries.  At any rate, Kingsley’s best ballads have no superior in the ballads of the Victorian era in lilt, in massiveness of stroke, in strange unexpected turns. The Weird Lady is an astonishing piece for a lad of twenty-one—­it begins with, “The swevens came up round Harold the Earl, Like motes in the sunnes beam”—­and it ends with the stanza: 

  A white dove out of the coffin flew;
    Earl Harold’s mouth it kist;
  He fell on his face, wherever he stood;
  And the white dove carried his soul to God
    Or ever the bearers wist.

That little piece is surely a bit of pure and rare ballad poetry.

A New Forest Ballad is also good, it ends thus—­

  They dug three graves in Lyndhurst yard;
    They dug them side by side;
  Two yeomen lie there, and a maiden fair,
    A widow and never a bride.

So too is the Outlaw, whose last request is this:—­

  And when I’m taen and hangit, mither,
      a brittling o’ my deer,
  Ye’ll no leave your bairn to the corbie craws,
      to dangle in the air;
  But ye’ll send up my twa douce brethren,
      and ye’ll steal me fra the tree,
  And bury me up on the brown, brown muirs,
      where I aye loved to be.

The famous ballad in Yeast might have been a great success if Kingsley would have limited it to five stanzas instead of twenty.  What a ring there is in the opening lines—­

  The merry brown hares came leaping
    Over the crest of the hill—­

If he could only have been satisfied with the first five stanzas what a ballad it would have been!—­If only he had closed it with the verse—­

  She thought of the dark plantation
    And the hares, and her husband’s blood,
  And the voice of her indignation
    Rose up to the throne of God.

That was enough for a ballad, but not for a political novel.  The other fifteen stanzas were required for his story; they may be vigorous rhetoric, impressive moralising, but they are too argumentative and too rhetorical to be ballad poetry.  It is curious how much of Kingsley’s work, both poetry and prose, is inspired by his love of sport and his indignation at game laws!