ew line, his strong and reckless sympathy, and above all by real
literary brilliance. Where he failed to impress, to teach, to
inspire--almost even though he stirred men to anger or laughter--Charles
Kingsley for a generation continued to interest the public, to scatter
amongst them ideas or problems; he made many people think, and gave many
people delight. He woke them up in all sorts of ways, about all sorts of
things. He wrote lyrics, songs, dramas, romances, sermons, Platonic
dialogues, newspaper articles, children's fairy books, scientific
manuals, philosophical essays, lectures, extravaganzas, and theological
polemics. Hardly any of these were quite in the first rank, and some of
them were thin, flashy, and almost silly. But most of them had the
saving gift of getting home to the interests, ideas, and tastes of the
great public, and he made them think even when he was very wrong himself.
Such activity, such keenness, such command of literary resources, has to
be reckoned with in a man of warm feeling and generous impulses; and
thus, if Charles Kingsley is no longer with very many either prophet or
master, he was a literary influence of at least the second rank in his
own generation.

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 w