George Eliot, during many years, was occasionally busy with what is formally poetry--informally, of course, much of her best prose was poetry, and poetry of a higher order. In some of her verse--in _Jubal_ and the _Spanish Gypsy_--she touched on the careers and characters of people whom she would hardly have brought into her novels, and in one or other of her poems she expressed with a fulness and intensity not found in her prose fiction that love of music and that sympathy with the aspirations of the musical artist which she shared with the great writer of _Abt Vogler_. The docile public received her poems with at least sufficient appreciation--a part of which may fairly be set down to the remembrance of those triumphs as a novelist which, for the time, she had laid aside. But her poems were, in the main, like Raphael’s departure from the art of his more constant practice--like the sonnets of Michael Angelo--the evidences of an artist’s aspiration towards a field of success which shall have the charm of what is new and unfamiliar. They were that, and hardly more. It is, of course, on the romances of George Eliot that her fame will rest, and on them not because of any reflection they present of the manners of our time--these, in truth, they left to other novelists--but because of the earnestness and profundity of their dealing with problems of the age, and problems of our nature. A future generation may find, and, indeed, not a few judges, most worthy to be listened to, declare already, that much of her sad philosophy is itself a mistake as great as any which her genius discovered in the world she lived in. But if George Eliot’s analysis of life betrays some deeply rooted faults, it will at least always be admitted that it was that of a grave and gifted inquirer. If the work which began with the _Scenes of Clerical Life_, and ended, not auspiciously, with _Theophrastus Such_, has great deficiencies, it was wrought, at all events, by a serious artist, a free and wonderful spirit. (_Standard_, 24th December 1880.) MY FEW THINGS ‘My few things!’ In the very title there is conveyed, I hope, some apology for writing of them. If I accept the invitation to do so, it is partly because I must needs know more of what they are--they are ‘but poor few,’ in Shakespeare’s phrase--than any one else can know; partly again because, as I am pleasantly informed, it may be interesting to certain readers to be told, for a change, not what can be amassed--amassed and perhaps neglected--by a millionaire who gives several thousand guineas for a modern painting, but what can be got together with merely ‘joyful trouble,’--with pains, and waiting, and love of the things, and only a little money--by a simple man of Letters, who happens to have been concerned, to some extent, with other arts than his own; and partly also because, connected with the few things that one has, there are associations, not few but many.