in arrest of formal
justice, is the motive of _The Sick King in Bokhara_; love, that wipes
out sin, of _Saint Brandan_--

That germ of kindness, in the womb
Of mercy caught, did not expire;
Outlives my guilt, outlives my doom,
And friends me in the pit of fire.

_The Neckan_ and _The Forsaken Merman_ tell the tale of contemptuous
unkindness and its enduring poison. _A Picture at Newstead_ depicts the
inexpiable evils wrought by violent wrong. _Poor Matthias_ tells in a
parable the cruelty, not less real because unconscious, of imperfect
sympathy--

Human longings, human fears,
Miss our eyes and miss our ears.
Little helping, wounding much,
Dull of heart, and hard of touch,
Brother man's despairing sign
Who may trust us to divine?

In _Geist's Grave_, the "loving heart," the "patient soul" of the
dog-friend are made to "read their homily to man"; and the theme of the
homily is still the same: the preciousness of the love which outlives
the grave. But nowhere perhaps is his doctrine about the true divinity
of love so exquisitely expressed as in _The Good Shepherd with the
Kid_--

_He saves the sheep, the goats He doth not save._
So rang Tertullian's sentence . . .
. . . . . But she sigh'd,
The infant Church! Of love she felt the tide
Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave.
And then she smiled; and in the Catacombs,
With eye suffused but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid
Her head 'mid ignominy, death, and tombs,
She the Good Shepherd's hasty image drew--
And on His shoulders not a lamb, a kid.

So much, then, for his Criticism of Life, as applied in and through his
poems. It is not easy to estimate, even approximately, the effect
produced by a loved and gifted poet, who for thirty years taught an
audience, fit though few, that the main concerns of human life were
Truth, Work, and Love. Those "two noblest of things, Sweetness and
Light" (though heaven only knows what they meant to Swift), meant to him
Love and Truth; and to these he added the third great ideal,
Work--patient, persistent, undaunted effort for what a man genuinely
believes to be high and beneficent ends. Such a "Criticism of Life," we
must all admit, is not unworthy of one who seeks to teach his
fellow-men; even though some may doubt whether poetry is the medium best
fitted for conveying it.

We must now turn our