recommend precisely the opposite course, and approved Lord Tennyson when in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After he set the turbid accusations of Carlyle and Ruskin to tuneful numbers, although he failed of Keats's success. Whereas a living poet, never mentioned by those who plume themselves on preoccupation with these problems has, I think, surpassed those slightly rhetorical stanzas in Keats's Pot of Basil, which had remained the high-water mark of expression on this theme.
A vision of those who suffer ranged like beggars on either side of the streaming street of active life has come to this poet. Like figures conceived by Rembrandt or Rodin, they appeal to us with patience and resignation, and he bids the nimble-footed crowd gaze on these their fellows whose feet are so slow that from age to age they seem to have advanced no more than statues. For him they are the statues cut out of flesh more enduring than marble, that in spite of change is ever the same in its capacity to suffer.
"Tarry a moment, happy feet
That to the sound of laughter glide!
O glad ones of the evening street,
Behold what forms are at your side!
You conquerors of the toilsome day
Pass by with laughter, labour done;
But these within their durance stay;
Their travail sleeps not with the sun.
They like dim statues without end,
Their patient attitudes maintain;
Your triumphing bright course attend,
But from your eager ways abstain.
Now, if you chafe in secret thought,
A moment turn from light distress,
And see how Fate on these have wrought,
Who yet so deeply acquiesce.
