Perhaps, if we are to try and disentangle the motive of the whole piece, to lay our finger on the main idea, we may say that it lies in the contrast between the solidity and unity of the artistic life, as opposed to the tinkering philanthropy of the Sociologist. _Aurora Leigh_ is an attempt from an artistic point of view to realise in concrete form the truth that the way to attack the bewildering problem of the nineteenth century, the moral elevation of the democracy, is not by attempting to cure in detail the material evils, which are after all nothing but the symptoms of a huge moral disease expressing itself in concrete fact, but by infusing a spirit which shall raise them from within. To attack it from its material side is like picking off the outer covering of a bud to assist it to blow, rather than by watering the plant to increase its vitality and its own power of internal action; in fact, as our clergy are so fond of saying, a spiritual solution is the only possible one, with this difference, that in _Aurora Leigh_ this attempt is made not so much from the side of dogmatic religion as of pure and more general enthusiasms. The insoluble enigma is unfortunately, whether, under the pressure of the present material surroundings, there is any hope of eliciting such an instinct at all; whether it is not actually annihilated by want and woe and the diseased transmission of hereditary sin. It is of course totally impossible to give any idea of a poem of this kind by quotations, partly, too, because as with most meditative poetry, the extracts are often more impressive by themselves than in their context, owing to the fact that the run of the poem is interfered with rather than assisted by them. But we may give a few specimens of various kinds. "I," she says, Will write my story for my better self, As when you paint your portrait for a friend Who keeps it in a drawer, and looks at it Long after he has ceased to love you, just To hold together what he was and is. And this is one of those mysterious, sudden images that take the fancy; she is describing the high edge of a chalk down: You might see In apparition in the golden sky ... the sheep run Along the fine clear outline, small as mice That run along a witch's scarlet thread. And this is a wonderful rendering of the effect, which never fails to impress the thought, of the mountains of a strange land rising into sight over the sea's rim: I felt the wind soft from the land of souls: The old miraculous mountain heaved in sight One straining past another along the shore The way of grand, tall Odyssean ghosts, Athirst to drink the cool blue wine of seas And stare on voyagers. We may conclude with this enchanting picture of an Italian evening: