many
people--commonplace and unpoetical it may be--but still heroical in
God's sight, were working harder than he ever worked, at the divine
drudgery of doing good, and that in dens of darkness and sloughs of
filth, from which he would have turned with disgust; so that the
sympathy with the sinful and fallen which marks his earlier poems, and
which perhaps verges on sentimentalism, gradually gives place to a
Pharisaic and contemptuous tone; a tone more lofty and manful in
seeming, but far less divine in fact. Perhaps comparative success had
injured him. Whilst struggling himself against circumstances, poor,
untaught, unhappy, he had more fellow-feeling, with those whom
circumstance oppressed. At least, the pity which he could once bestow
upon the misery which he met in his daily walks, he now kept for the
more picturesque woes of Italy and Greece.

In this, too, he was weak; that he had altogether forgotten that
the fire from off the altar could only be kept alight by continual
self-restraint and self-sacrifice, by continual gentleness and
humility, shown in the petty matters of everyday home-life; and that
he who cannot rule his own household can never rule the Church of God.
And so it befell, that amid the little cross-blasts of home squabbles
the sacred spark was fast going out. The poems written after he
settled at Penalva are marked by a less definite purpose, by a lower
tone of feeling: not, perhaps, by a lower moral tone; but simply by
less of any moral tone at all. They are more and more full of merely
sensuous beauty, mere word-painting, mere word-hunting. The desire of
finding something worth saying gives place more and more to that of
saying something in a new fashion. As the originality of thought
(which accompanies only vigorous moral purpose) decreases, the attempt
at originality of language increases. Manner, in short, has taken the
place of matter. The art, it may be, of his latest poems is greatest:
but it has been expended on the most unworthy themes. The later are
mannered caricatures of the earlier, without their soul; and the same
change seems to have passed over him which (with Mr. Ruskin's pardon)
transformed the Turner of 1820 into the Turner of 1850.

Thus had Elsley transferred what sympathy he had left from
needle-women and ragged schools, dwellers in Jacob's Island and
sleepers in the dry arches of Waterloo Bridge, to sufferers of a more
poetic class. Whether his sympathies showed thereby