Modern Poets Of Faith, Doubt, & Paganism And Other Essays: With A Memoir Of The Author By E.s. Talbot

PREFACE The Essays included in this volume originally appeared in the Church Quarterly Review, and were-with the exception of that on Tennyson, which came out in 1893-written by my husband between 1878 and 1883, the period of his life when there was least pressure on his time, and when he was therefore more free than at any other to devote himself to those literary studies which were always among the chief interests and pleasures of his life. He never revised the Essays, and I have thought it best to leave them practically unaltered, in spite of certain anachronisms which the lapse of time has made inevitable. I may perhaps be permitted to relate that, when the essay on Julian was published, Mr. Gladstone was so struck with it that he wrote to ask the name of the author, and was answered by the Editor of the Church Qularterly in the words, "You have not far to look." I should like to express my gratitude to the Bishop of Rochester for writing the Memoir which precedes the Essays at a time when his work was more than usually pressing, and to thank those friends who have kindly contributed recollections of my husband's life and work. My thanks are also due to the Editor of the Church Quarterly Review for his courtesy in allowing me to reprint the Essays. KATHLEEN LYTTELTON. CONTENTS. Memoir of the Author. Tennyson. Browning. The Poetry of Doubt (Arnold and Cough). Carlyle's Life and Works. George Eliot. Modern Pagan Poetry (Swinburne and James Thomson). The Pagan Under the Emperor Julian. Memoir of the Author. I have undertaken to record partly in my own words and partly in the words of others some-thing of the character and mental history of the writer of these Essays. He hated memorials and advertisements but we owe it to ourselves and to what he was to make this much mention of it. For it may be confidently said that by his death his land and his Church have lost one of the strongest, best-furnished, and, so far as man may judge, best of her sons. There was much in him that would lend itself to an ideal description- the physical beauty of his manhood, the grace and variety of his knowledge, the strength and sanity of his judgment, the union of strong conviction with largeness of mind, the equal gifts for action and for counsel, the consistent success in all to which he put his hand yet his personality was not one of those which take the world by storm-his influence, strong and steady as it was, was not of the magical sort. He was one whom every one could admire and respect, but not one who was quickly known, or whom many knew well. He owed a great debt to circumstances, and he set his own stamp on what he received. Few of the sons of that noble generation of high-souled men and lofty loyalties with which the Victorian age opened began life under better auspices. He was the fifth son of a father- the good Lord Lyttelton, as, to borrow the soubriquet of an ancestor, he may well be called-whose strong personality almost constrained to a high standard of living and thinking the lives of his eight sons-a brilliant scholar, Senior Classic at Cambridge, a bold rider, a man of exact method and capacity for business, and one in whom the virility of an impulsive and boyish nature and unfaltering submission to the discipline of religion produced a blend as rare as it was simple and spontaneous...