But in this he was weak: that he did not feel, or at least was
forgetting fast, that this gift had been bestowed on him for any
practical purpose. No one would demand that he should have gone forth
with some grand social scheme, to reform a world which looked to him
so mean and evil. He was not a man of business, and was not meant
to be one. But it was ill for him that in his fastidiousness and
touchiness he had shut himself out from that world, till he had quite
forgotten how much good there was in it as well as evil; how many
people--commonplace and unpoetical it may be--but still heroical in
God's sight, were working harder than he ever worked, at the divine
drudgery of doing good, and that in dens of darkness and sloughs of
filth, from which he would have turned with disgust; so that the
sympathy with the sinful and fallen which marks his earlier poems, and
which perhaps verges on sentimentalism, gradually gives place to a
Pharisaic and contemptuous tone; a tone more lofty and manful in
seeming, but far less divine in fact. Perhaps comparative success had
injured him. Whilst struggling himself against circumstances, poor,
untaught, unhappy, he had more fellow-feeling, with those whom
circumstance oppressed. At least, the pity which he could once bestow
upon the misery which he met in his daily walks, he now kept for the
more picturesque woes of Italy and Greece.
In this, too, he was weak; that he had altogether forgotten that
the fire from off the altar could only be kept alight by continual
self-restraint and self-sacrifice, by continual gentleness and
humility, shown in the petty matters of everyday home-life; and that
he who cannot rule his own household can never rule the Church of God.
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