But FitzGerald’s design was not speculation, it was disclosure, and when this is so poetry should breathe the spirit of the labourer addressing his wife, “I’m not arguin’, I’m a-tellin’ of yer.” If the reader should think it worth while, for comparative purposes, to turn up a forgotten but splendid poem, _Memorials of Mortality_, by Joshua Sylvester,[21] he will find an admirable example of faith in somewhat lugubrious but trumpet-toned poetic assertion. There is no arguing in Sylvester, it is all rhetorical and solemn revelation, wholly indifferent to its audience and unconscious of the possibility of denial. With FitzGerald there is an undertone always of anxiety to carry opinion with him, very indefinite in expression and yet present clearly enough if our attention is close. We do not complain about it; to do so would be at once foolish and ungenerous. But we are aware of it and we know that it is in some subtle way, and perhaps unconsciously, a concession to a mood of the time, which, as we have seen, was a little antagonistic to the most commanding kind of poetic fulfilment. When we read-- ’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays: Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays, And one by one back in the Closet lays. The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes, But Right or Left as strikes the Player goes; And He that toss’d Thee down into the Field, _He_ knows about it all--He knows--HE knows! we cannot but admire the masterly, indeed the unforgettable way in which the philosophic position is set forth, nor can we deny that the statement is fairly within the terms of poetry. But in such notes as this, which are frequent in the _Rubaiyat_, we detect a certain faltering in imaginative faith, not precisely in intellectual conviction about the creed which is being expounded, but in the spiritual exaltation that may lift any creed, whether it be sacramental and beatific as in Crashaw’s _St. Theresa_, or stoic as in Emily Brontë’s _Last Lines_, or inscrutably naturalistic as in Mr. Ralph Hodgson’s _Song of Honour_, above the regions of debate to the very pinnacle of authority. When all these reservations have been made, there is enough virtue and to spare in Victorian poetry to leave it written as a new and glorious chapter in the most national of our arts, nor can spiritual ecstasy itself be wholly denied it, as _Dost Thou Not Care?_ and many other poems by Christina Rossetti, Tennyson’s _Crossing the Bar_, Browning’s _Prospice_, and, dark though its conclusions be, Arnold’s _Dover Beach_, and Mrs. Browning’s _Weeping Saviour_, and Coventry Patmore’s _Vesica Piscis_, to name half a dozen poems at a venture, can testify. But, considering the manifestations of poetry in that age as a whole, spiritual ecstasy was one of its least constant achievements. Chapter V _Love Poetry and the Victorian Use of Nature_