to know his name, he would put
it on his title-page. If he does not choose to do that, we have no
more right to pry into his secret than we have to discuss his family
affairs or open his letters. But every rule has its exceptional
cases; and the book which stands first upon our list is surely such.
All the world, somehow or other, knows the author. His name has been
mentioned unhesitatingly by several reviews already, whether from
private information, or from the certainty which every well-read
person must feel that there is but one man in England possessed at
once of poetic talent and artistic experience sufficient for so noble
a creation. We hope, therefore, that we shall not be considered
impertinent if we ignore an incognito which all England has ignored
before us, and attribute "In Memoriam" to the pen of the author of
"The Princess."

Such a course will probably be the more useful one to our readers;
for this last work of our only living great poet seems to us at once
the culmination of all his efforts and the key to many difficulties
in his former writings. Heaven forbid that we should say that it
completes the circle of his powers. On the contrary, it gives us
hope of broader effort in new fields of thought and forms of art.
But it brings the development of his Muse and of his Creed to a
positive and definite point. It enables us to claim one who has been
hitherto regarded as belonging to a merely speculative and peirastic
school as the willing and deliberate champion of vital Christianity,
and of an orthodoxy the more sincere because it has worked upward
through the abyss of doubt; the more mighty for good because it
justifies and consecrates the aesthetics and the philosophy of the
present age. We are sure, moreover, that the author, whatever right
reasons he may have had for concealing his own name, would have no
quarrel against us for alluding to it, were he aware of the idolatry
with which every utterance of his is regarded by the cultivated young
men of our day, especially at the universities, and of the infinite
service of which this "In Memoriam" may be to them, if they are
taught by it that their superiors are not ashamed of faith, and that
they will rise instead of falling, fulfil instead of denying the
cravings of their hearts and intellects, if they will pass upwards
with their teacher from the vague though noble expectations of
"Locksley Hall," to the assured and everlasting facts of the pr