"'I ha' harpit ye up to the throne o' God, I ha' harpit your midmost soul in three; I ha' harpit ye down to the Hinges o' Hell, And--ye--would--make--a Knight o' me!'" "Not long ago an interviewer called on Mr. Meredith, and brought away this for his pains:-- "'I suppose I should regard myself as getting old--I am seventy-four. But I do not feel to be growing old either in heart or mind. I still look on life with a young man's eye. I have always hoped I should not grow old as some do--with a palsied intellect, living backwards, regarding other people as anachronisms because they themselves have lived on into other times, and left their sympathies behind them with their years.' "He never will. He will always preserve the strength of manhood in his work because hope, the salt of manhood, is the savour of all his philosophy. When I think of his work as a whole--his novels and poems together--this confession of his appears to me, not indeed to summarise it--for it is far too multifarious and complex--but to say the first and the last word upon it. In poem and in novel he puts a solemnity of his own into the warning, _ne tu pueri contempseris annos_. He has never grown old, because his hopes are set on the young; and his dearest wish, for those who can read beneath his printed word, is to leave the world not worse, but so much the better as a man may, for the generations to come after him. To him this is 'the cry of the conscience of life':--" "'Keep the young generations in hail, And bequeath them no tumbled house.' "To him this is at once a duty and a 'sustainment supreme,' and perhaps the bitterest words this master of Comedy has written are for the seniors of the race who-- "'On their last plank, Pass mumbling it as nature's final page,' "And cramp the young with their rules of 'wisdom,' lest, as he says scornfully:-- "'Lest dreaded change, long dammed by dull decay, Should bring the world a vessel steered by brain, And ancients musical at close of day.' "'Earth loves her young,' begins his next sonnet:-- "'Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads The ways they walk; by what they speak oppressed.' "But his conviction, if here for a moment it discharges gall, is usually cheerful with the cheerfulness of health. Sometimes he consciously expounds it; oftener he leaves you to seek and find it, but always (I believe) you will find this happy hope in youth at the base of everything he writes. "The next thing to be noted is that he does not hope in youth because it is a period of license and waywardness, but because it is a period of imagination-- "'Days, when the ball of our vision Had eagles that flew unabashed to sun,'