TRAMP. ... Stars! Give me the lamps along the Old Kent Road; And I'm content to leave the stars to you. They're well enough; but hung a trifle high For walking with clean boots. Now a lamp or so.... DICK. If it's so fine and brave, the Old Kent Road, How is it you came to leave it? TRAMP. ... I'd my reasons ... But I was scared: the loneliness and all; The quietness, and the queer creepy noises; And something that I couldn't put a name to, A kind of feeling in my marrow-bones, As though the great black hills against the sky Had come alive about me in the night, And they were watching me; as though I stood Naked, in a big room, with blind men sitting, Unseen, all round me, in the quiet darkness, That was not dark to them. And all the stars Were eyeing me; and whisperings in the heather Were like cold water trickling down my spine: Putting an early and a late book side by side in this way, the contrast is astonishing. And it is not an unfair method of comparison, because when the new ideal appears it strikes suddenly into the work, and sharply differentiates it at once from all that had been written before. Like the larger movement which it so aptly illustrates, the change is conscious, deliberate, and full of significance; and it is the cardinal fact in this author's poetical career. It marks the stage at which he came to grips with reality: when he brought his art into relation with life: when the making of poetic beauty as an end in itself could no longer content him; and the social conscience, already prompting contemporary thought, quickened in him too.