"('Lean fare,' as the poet observes; and unpalatable, for instance, to our Members of Parliament, to whom our Mr. Balfour one evening paid the highest compliment within their range of apprehension by assuming that quite a large number of them could write cheques for £69,000 without inconvenience.) At the best, too, she offers, with the loss of things we have desired, a serene fortitude to endure their loss:—
"'Love born of knowledge, love that gains
Vitality as Earth it mates,
The meaning of the Pleasures, Pains,
The Life, the Death, illuminates.
"'For love we Earth, then serve we all;
Her mystic secret then is ours:
We fall, or view our treasures fall,
Unclouded—as beholds her flowers
"'Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,
Enrobed in morning's mounted fire,
When lowly, with a broken neck,
The crocus lays her cheek to mire.'
"'Love born of knowledge, love that gains
Vitality as Earth it mates,
The meaning of the Pleasures, Pains,
The Life, the Death, illuminates.
"'For love we Earth, then serve we all;
Her mystic secret then is ours:
We fall, or view our treasures fall,
Unclouded—as beholds her flowers
"'Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,
Enrobed in morning's mounted fire,
When lowly, with a broken neck,
The crocus lays her cheek to mire.'
"But at least it is the true milk for man that she distils—
"'From her heaved breast of sacred common mould';
"'From her heaved breast of sacred common mould';
"The breast (to quote from another poem)—
"'Which is his well of strength, his home of rest,
And fair to scan.'
"'Which is his well of strength, his home of rest,
And fair to scan.'
"And so Mr. Meredith, having diagnosed our disease, which is Self— our 'distempered devil of Self,' gluttonous of its own enjoyments and therefore necessarily a foe to law, which rests on temperance and self-control—walks among men like his own wise physician, Melampus, with eyes that search the book of Nature closely, as well for love of her as to discover and extract her healing secrets.