Has George Meredith’s vigorous, almost massive harp a message for humanity? is the natural inquiry of those who reading Wordsworth or Tennyson find in their works sure faiths and consolatory teaching. And is such message so abeyant that only those of his readers who are endowed with power of subtle divination may find it? Certainly in the case of the seer the debt of clear utterance is obligatory, just as from the lyricist we look for delight and tears and mellifluence; it is a responsibility that falls from heaven with the mantle of inspiration, only a congenital inceptitude for lucidity excuses it. Too often, it must be confessed, it is only the ghostly sense of a message that trails through Mr. Meredith’s work, glimpsing and disappearing in will-o’-wisp fashion. The thirsting traveller chasing such mirages of meaning over the sands of obscurity may be pardoned if he conclude that to only the very privileged few does the Fata Morgana of his muse grant a kindly haven of specific instruction. But while this is true of passages and poems, it is not true of all his poems. There is much in his volumes of verse that state distinctly his philosophical principles. The ground-work of Mr. Meredith’s philosophy is the worth of nature as distinct from the artificial institutions of man. In nature pure exists the true temple of wisdom; it is the tribunal whereat all knowledge and sentiment must finally receive its endorsement or its condemnation. In nature we open the real book of life. It is, therefore, that in his verse we find continually a worship of the liberty of the forest, a recognition of its power to promote the vital growth of heart and head. Mr. Meredith would not have us forget that the mind and spirit are integral elements of nature. Particularly in “The Woods of Westermain,” beginning, “Enter these enchanted woods, You who dare—”