laugh at a man if one has not a lurking love for him, as one
really ought to have for Elsley. How much value is to be attached to
his mere power of imagination and fancy, and so forth, is a question;
but there was in him more than mere talent: there was, in thought at
least, virtue and magnanimity.

True, the best part of him, perhaps almost all the good part of him,
spent itself in words, and must be looked for, not in his life, but in
his books. But in those books it can be found; and if you look through
them, you will see that he has not touched upon a subject without
taking, on the whole, the right, and pure, and lofty view of it.
Howsoever extravagant he may be in his notions of poetic licence, that
licence is never with him a synonym for licentiousness. Whatever is
tender and true, whatever is chivalrous and high-minded, he loves at
first sight, and reproduces it lovingly. And it may be possible that
his own estimate of his poems was not altogether wrong; that his words
may have awakened here and there in others a love for that which is
morally as well as physically beautiful, and may have kept alive in
their hearts the recollection that, both for the bodies and the souls
of men forms of life far nobler and fairer than those which we see now
are possible; that they have appeared, in fragments at least, already
on the earth; that they are destined, perhaps, to reappear and combine
themselves in some ideal state, and in

"One far-off divine event,
Toward which the whole creation moves."

This is the special and proper function of the poet; that he may do
this, does God touch his lips with that which, however it may be
misused, is still fire from off the altar beneath which the spirits
of his saints cry,--"Lord, how long?" If he "reproduce the beautiful"
with this intent, however so little, then is he of the sacred guild.
And because Vavasour had this gift, therefore he was a poet.

But in this he was weak: that he did not feel, or at least was
forgetting fast, that this gift had been bestowed on him for any
practical purpose. No one would demand that he should have gone forth
with some grand social scheme, to reform a world which looked to him
so mean and evil. He was not a man of business, and was not meant
to be one. But it was ill for him that in his fastidiousness and
touchiness he had shut himself out from that world, till he had quite
forgotten how much good there was in it as well as evil; how