And yet the whole has something of the character of a despatch from a divinely gifted special correspondent. And the same thing may be said sometimes even of so spiritually immaculate a writer as Christina Rossetti. _Goblin Market_ is a masterpiece, conceived out of a lovely nature and flawlessly executed, but if our minds go from it to Drayton or Herrick, with whom it has some affinity, we are aware not of a surer touch in the older poets but of a stricter visitation. _Under the Rose_, a triumph of delicately controlled power, has, very elusively here, the same suggestion of something occasional in its character. Perhaps the most notable instance of all is Edward FitzGerald’s _Rubaiyat_,[20] and here we are on delicate ground, since we are speaking of not only one of the most celebrated poems of the age, but of one of the most remarkable. At first thought it might seem that of no poet could it less justifiably be said that in his principal lifework he was allowing any occasional or even any external influence to play upon his creative mood. Fastidious in judgment, of lonely intellectual pursuits, having not the slightest regard for contemporary fame, indolent rather than eager in creation and, far from seeking occasion for poetry, relieved when he could pass it by, as he generally could, and wholly unconscious of anything like a mission, FitzGerald might well have been the last poet in whom to look for the accidental quality of which we are speaking. And yet it is this accidental quality that keeps his _Rubaiyat_, so rich in memorable excellence, so splendidly contrived and so often universal in its nature, from being among the very greatest moral poems in the language. The circumstance that it took its form from FitzGerald’s Oriental studies and is Persian in its machinery is of no consequence; Shakespeare was equally Shakespeare in the Roman world and mediæval legend and his modern England, and as much might be said for Morris in FitzGerald’s own time. Here was a poem that was essentially religious in character--that its doctrine was one of agnostic hedonism notwithstanding. For such a poem to come to the highest achievement possible to its kind, the first indispensable condition is an uncompromising faith, and this is what Fitzgerald had not even in his own _dolce far niente_. There had once in English poetry been an age of faith, and there had once been an age of reason, but FitzGerald was of an age in which faith and reason were, in the life of the nation, for the moment inextricably confused, and when poetry addressed itself to rhapsodical belief--or unbelief if you will--as it did in the _Rubaiyat_, the seductions of reason were ever-present and the fervour of confession was embarrassed by the insinuations of argument. This did not much matter in _In Memoriam_ or in the great part of Browning’s work that was religious in texture, because here speculation was, for good or ill, very largely the explicit province of the poetry.