Kingsley was a striking example of that which is so characteristic of recent English literature--its strong, practical, social, ethical, or theological bent. It is in marked contrast with French literature. Our writers are always using their literary gifts to preach, to teach, to promulgate a new social or religious movement, to reform somebody or something to illustrate a new doctrine. From first to last, Carlyle regarded himself even more as preacher than as artist: so does his follower, Mr. Ruskin. Macaulay seemed to write history in order to prove the immeasurable superiority of the Whig to the Tory; and Froude and Freeman write history to enforce their own moral. Disraeli's novels were the programme of a party and the defence of a cause; and even Dickens and Thackeray plant their knives deep into the social abuses of their time. Charles Kingsley was not professed novelist, nor professed man of letters. He was novelist, poet, essayist, and historian, almost by accident, or with ulterior aims. Essentially, he was a moralist, a preacher, a socialist, a reformer, and a theologian. To begin with his poetry, and he himself began his literary career with verses at the age of sixteen, he began to write poetry almost as a child, and some of his earlier verses are his best. If Kingsley, with all his literary gifts, was never quite in the first rank in anything, he came nearest to being a poet of mark. Some of his ballads almost touch the high-water mark of true ballad poetry, with its abrupt fierce blows of tragedy and pathos, its simple touches of primitive rude speech, its reserve of force, its unspoken mysteries. At any rate, Kingsley's best ballads have no superior in the ballads of the Victorian era in lilt, in massiveness of stroke, in strange unexpected turns. _The Weird Lady_ is an astonishing piece for a lad of twenty-one--it begins with, "The swevens came up round Harold the Earl, Like motes in the sunnes beam"--and it ends with the stanza: A white dove out of the coffin flew; Earl Harold's mouth it kist; He fell on his face, wherever he stood; And the white dove carried his soul to God Or ever the bearers wist. That little piece is surely a bit of pure and rare ballad poetry. A _New Forest Ballad_ is also good, it ends thus-- They dug three graves in Lyndhurst yard; They dug them side by side; Two yeomen lie there, and a maiden fair, A widow and never a bride. So too is the _Outlaw_, whose last request is this:-- And when I'm taen and hangit, mither, a brittling o' my deer, Ye'll no leave your bairn to the corbie craws, to dangle in the air; But ye'll send up my twa douce brethren, and ye'll steal me fra the tree, And bury me up on the brown, brown muirs, where I aye loved to be. The famous ballad in _Yeast_ might have been a great success if Kingsley would have limited it to five stanzas instead of twenty. What a ring there is in the opening lines--