the world-wide elements in it, but he felt its varied and profound humanity, and naturally, feeling one side more than another, he chose to make of it a drama, not an epic. Into this subject, enlarged by imaginative invention, he could interweave all he knew and loved of human life. And the poem is indeed remarkable for a distinctive, even a weighty representation, in imaginative forms, of the great forces of the life of mankind; of the moral passions, high aims, grave issues, and temptations of individual characters. In the beginning the treatment of these matters is rapid, even superficial, but the latter part is dignified workmanship; as if the writer's life had been solemnised by misfortune into endurance.
The most difficult part of his subject to treat was the temptation of Joseph by Phraxanor, the wife of Potiphar; and it proves the power of Wells that it is the finest passage in the poem, Art demanded that she should be sensual, yet not trivial or base; that there should be qualities in her nature which should lift her, in an imperious personality and passion, above the vulgarity of mere immorality, And there is in her, as conceived by the poet, so great an intellectual power in her passion, so frank and bold a will, without one trace of hypocrisy, that she seems, at a far lower dramatic level, to draw towards Shakespeare's Cleopatra, yet without her vanity, her petulance, her flashes of cowardice and courage. She has no repentance, no hesitation; her wrath is as deep as her
