"'For love we Earth, then serve we all; Her mystic secret then is ours: We fall, or view our treasures fall, Unclouded--as beholds her flowers "'Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, When lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire.' "But at least it is the true milk for man that she distils-- "'From her heaved breast of sacred common mould'; "The breast (to quote from another poem)-- "'Which is his well of strength, his home of rest, And fair to scan.' "And so Mr. Meredith, having diagnosed our disease, which is Self-- our 'distempered devil of Self,' gluttonous of its own enjoyments and therefore necessarily a foe to law, which rests on temperance and self-control--walks among men like his own wise physician, Melampus, with eyes that search the book of Nature closely, as well for love of her as to discover and extract her healing secrets. "'With love exceeding a simple love of the things That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck; Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck; Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball; Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook; The good physician Melampus, loving them all, Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book. "'For him the woods were a home and gave him the key Of knowledge, thirst for their treasures in herbs and flowers. The secrets held by the creatures nearer than we To earth he sought, and the link of their life with ours. . . .' "Here by another road we come to a teaching which is also the Gospels': that to apprehend the highest truth one must have a mind of extreme humility. 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,' 'Neither shall they say, Lo here! or Lo there! for behold the kingdom of God is within you,' 'And He took a little child and set him in the midst of them,' &c. Poetry cannot make these sayings any truer than they are, but it can illuminate for us the depths of their truth, and so (be it humbly said) can help their acceptance by man. If they come down from heaven, derived from arguments too high for his ken, poetry confirms them by arguments taken from his own earth, instructing him the while to read it as-- "'An Earth alive with meanings, wherein meet Buried, and breathing, and to be,' "And teaching him, 'made lowly wise,' that the truth of the highest heavens lies scattered about his feet.