He saw
an opponent (it might be Father Newman): his heart lusted for a fight; he
called his opponent names, he threw his cap into the ring, he took his
coat off, he fought, he got a terrible scientific drubbing. It was like
a sixth-form boy matching himself against the champion. And then he bore
no malice. He took his defeat bravely. Nay, are we not left with a
confused feeling that he was not far in the wrong, though he had so much
the worse of the fight?

Such was Kingsley: a man with a boy's heart; a hater of cruelty and
injustice, and also with a brave, indomitable belief that his own country
and his own cause were generally in the right, whatever the quarrel. He
loved England like a mistress, and hated her enemies, Spain and the Pope,
though even in them he saw the good. He is for ever scolding the Spanish
for their cruelties to the Indians, but he defends our doings to the
Irish, which (at that time) were neither more nor less oppressive than
the Spanish performances in America. "Go it, our side!" you always hear
this good Kingsley crying; and one's heart goes out to him for it, in an
age when everybody often proves his own country to be in the wrong.

Simple, brave, resolute, manly, a little given to "robustiousness,"
Kingsley transfigured all these qualities by possessing the soul and the
heart of a poet. He was not a very great poet, indeed, but a true
poet--one of the very small band who are cut off, by a gulf that can
never be passed, from mere writers of verse, however clever, educated,
melodious, ingenious, amiable, and refined. He had the real spark of
fire, the true note; though the spark might seldom break into flame, and
the note was not always clear. Never let us confuse true poets with
writers of verse, still less with writers of "poetic prose." Kingsley
wrote a great deal of that-perhaps too much: his descriptions of scenes
are not always as good as in Hereward's ride round the Fens, or when the
tall, Spanish galleon staggers from the revenge of man to the vengeance
of God, to her doom through the mist, to her rest in the sea. Perhaps
only a poet could have written that prose; it is certain no writer of
"poetic prose" could have written Kingsley's poems.

His songs are his best things; they really are songs, not merely lyric
poems. They have the merit of being truly popular, whether they are
romantic, like "The Sands o' Dee," which actually reproduces the best
qualities of the old bal