The merry brown hares came leaping Over the crest of the hill-- If he could only have been satisfied with the first five stanzas what a ballad it would have been!--If only he had closed it with the verse-- She thought of the dark plantation And the hares, and her husband's blood, And the voice of her indignation Rose up to the throne of God. That was enough for a ballad, but not for a political novel. The other fifteen stanzas were required for his story; they may be vigorous rhetoric, impressive moralising, but they are too argumentative and too rhetorical to be ballad poetry. It is curious how much of Kingsley's work, both poetry and prose, is inspired by his love of sport and his indignation at game laws! His songs, spoiled as they are to our ears by poor music and too often maudlin voices, are as good songs and as fitted for singing as any in our time. _The Sands of Dee_, hacknied and vulgarised as it is by the banalities of the drawing-room, is really (to use a hacknied and vulgarised phrase) a "haunting" piece of song; and though Ruskin may pronounce "the cruel crawling foam" to be a false use of the pathetic fallacy, the song, for what it professes to be, is certainly a thing to live. I have always felt more kindly toward the East wind since Kingsley's _Welcome, wild North-Easter_!; and his Church Hymns such as--_Who will say the world is dying?_ and _The Day of the Lord is at hand, at hand!_--are far above the level even of the better modern hymns. We have not yet touched upon Kingsley's longest and most ambitious poem--_The Saint's Tragedy_. With all its merits and beauties it is a mistake. It was avowedly a controversial diatribe against the celibacy and priestcraft of Romanism, and was originally designed to be in prose. That is not a safe basis for a dramatic poem, and the poem suffers from the fact that it is in great part a theological pamphlet. It would have made a most interesting historical novel as a mediaeval pendant to _Hypatia_; but it is not a great lyrical drama. As we have had no great lyrical drama at all since _Manfred_ and _The Cenci_, that is not much in its dispraise. There are powerful passages, much poetic grace in the piece; but the four thousand lines of this elaborate polemical poem rather weary us, and a perfervid appeal to the Protestantism and uxoriousness of Britons should have been cast into other moulds.