itself pure, not primarily to the eye, but to the mind: attempting to
achieve its destiny and to fulfil its life in the perfections of
intellectual beauty and aesthetic delight. But the palace of art, _made
the palace of the soul_, becomes its dungeon-house, self-generating and
filling fast with all loathsome and deathly shapes; and the heaven of
intellectual joy becomes at last a more penetrative and intenser hell.
The "Idylls of the King" are but exquisite variations on the one
note--that the only true and high life of humanity is the life of full
and free obedience; and that such life on earth becomes of necessity one
of struggle, sorrow, outward loss and apparent failure. In "Vivien"--the
most remarkable of them all for the subtlety of its conception and the
delicacy of its execution,--the picture is perhaps the darkest and
saddest time can show--that of a nature rich to the utmost in all lower
wisdom of the mind, struggling long and apparently truly against the
flesh, yet all the while dallying with the foul temptation, till the
flesh prevails; and in a moment, swift and sure as the lightning, moral
and spiritual death swoops down, and we see the lost one no more.

Many other illustrations might be given from our noblest and truest
poetry--from the works of the Brownings, the "Saints' Tragedy" of Charles
Kingsley, the dramatic poems of Henry Taylor--of the extent to which it
is vitally, even where not formally Christian; the extent to which the
truth of the Cross has transfused it, and become one chief source of its
depth and power. But we must hasten on to our more immediate object in
these remarks.

Those who read works of fiction merely for amusement, may be surprised
that it should be thought possible they could be vehicles for conveying
to us the deepest practical truth of Christianity,--that the highest life
of man only begins when he begins to accept and to bear the Cross; and