"Go it, our side!" you always hear this good Kingsley crying; and
one's heart goes out to him for it, in an age when everybody often
proves his own country to be in the wrong.
Simple, brave, resolute, manly, a little given to "robustiousness,"
Kingsley transfigured all these qualities by possessing the soul and
the heart of a poet. He was not a very great poet, indeed, but a
true poet--one of the very small band who are cut off, by a gulf
that can never be passed, from mere writers of verse, however
clever, educated, melodious, ingenious, amiable, and refined. He
had the real spark of fire, the true note; though the spark might
seldom break into flame, and the note was not always clear. Never
let us confuse true poets with writers of verse, still less with
writers of "poetic prose." Kingsley wrote a great deal of that-
perhaps too much: his descriptions of scenes are not always as good
as in Hereward's ride round the Fens, or when the tall, Spanish
galleon staggers from the revenge of man to the vengeance of God, to
her doom through the mist, to her rest in the sea. Perhaps only a
poet could have written that prose; it is certain no writer of
"poetic prose" could have written Kingsley's poems.
His songs are his best things; they really are songs, not merely
lyric poems. They have the merit of being truly popular, whether
they are romantic, like "The Sands o' Dee," which actually
reproduces the best qualities of the old ballad; or whether they are
pathetic, like the "Doll's Song," in "Water Babies"; or whether they
attack an abuse, as in the song of "The Merry Brown Hares"; or
whether they soar higher, as in "Deep, deep Love, within thine own
abyss abiding"; or whether they are mere noble nonsense, as in
"Lorraine Loree":-
"She mastered young Vindictive; oh, the gallant lass was she,
And kept him straight and won the race, as near as near could be;
But he killed her at the brook against a pollard willow tree;
Oh, he killed her at the brook, the brute, for all the world to see,
And no one but the baby cried for poor Lorraine Loree.
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