"The fountains of life are all within."

He preaches fortitude and courage in the face of the mysterious and
the inevitable--a courage, indeed, forlorn and pathetic in the eyes of
many--and he constantly takes refuge from the choking cares of life,
in a kind of stoical resignation." As a reformer, his function
was especially to stir people up, to make them dissatisfied with
themselves and their institutions, and to force them to think, to
become individual. Everywhere in his works one is confronted by his
unvarying insistence upon the supremacy of conduct and duty. The
modern tendency to drift away from the old, established religious
faith was a matter of serious thought to him and led him to give to
the world a rational creed that would satisfy the sceptics and attract
the indifferent. We cannot do better than quote for our closing
thought the following pregnant lines from the author's sonnet entitled
_The Better Part_:--

"Hath man no second life? _Pitch this one high!_
Sits there no judge in Heaven, our sin to see?
_More strictly, then, the inward judge obey_!
Was Christ a man like us? _Ah! let us try
If we then, too, can be such men as he!_"

* * * * *



ARNOLD THE CRITIC