The lark-note is not, however, the leading characteristic of Mr. Meredith’s muse, although quite within the scope of it. It is rather the lark’s joy in nature clothed with the more artificial vocalism of man. Mr. Meredith is pantheist in large measure when he attunes his lute-strings to the demands of Mother Earth. For him the gods of Greece do not live only in the pages of Lempriere, as most modern poets would have us believe, but they still maintain, albeit in more subtle form, their old supreme habitation in lawn and sylvan hollow, or mix with the familiar miracle of grey eve and rose-red dawn. In his verse Mr. Meredith hastens to undo the harness of that worldly wisdom that binds him in his novels. He re-baptizes himself to the graces of nature pure, rejoices in all that belongs to the idealism of primitive life. The poet can pipe as rustically as a faun when he is so minded. He can pay a moving tribute to young love and the romance of vernal feeling, as proved by that beautiful lift of minstrelsy, “Love in the Valley,” with its limpid, ecstatic meter, its delicious imagery and spiritual sweetness of thought; not to speak of many other lyrics of the same sort. These lighter pleasures and profits of George Meredith, together with his more serious efforts, like “Ode to the Spirit of Earth and Autumn,” a magnificent color-poem, uniquely accenting the bacchic abandon of October and trumpeting mightily the note of triumphant manhood, and “The Nuptials of Attila,” full of a haunting rush of language, ought to afford substantial relish to the general admirers of high art.