"Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair."

We do not need to be the enemy of the Arminians to resolve the music of
Milton; and we may live all our lives in a city and yet know Wordsworth
for a great poet. Shelley does not suffer because philosophic anarchy
has gone out of fashion; and the poetry of the Hebrews lives for ever,
though its readers have never lived in the shadow of Sinai. These
mighty instances are here intended not to establish a comparison but to
establish a principle. The exact source of Mr Kipling's inspiration
matters not a straw. We simply know that his machinery is alive and
lovely in his eyes. He communicates his passion to his reader though
his readers are unable to distinguish between a piston-rod and a
cylinder-cover.

_The Day's Work_ throws back a clear and searching light upon some of
the tales, Indian and political, which we have already passed in
review. As we look back upon these stories of men and women we
realise, in the light of _The Day's Work_, that machinery--the
machinery of Army and Empire--enters repeatedly as a leading motive.
Far from regarding Mr Kipling's passion for technical engineering as
something which gets in the way of his natural genius for telling human
tales, we are brought finally to realise that many of these human tales
are no more than an excuse for the indulging of a passion that
helplessly spins them. As literature _William the Conqueror_ and _The
Head of the District_ have less to do with the politics of India than
with the nuts and bolts of _The Ship That Found Herself_. The same