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Essays in Little by Andrew Lang
page 121 of 209 (57%)
modern masters of prose-poetry. They have never been poets. But
the prose of a poet like Milton may be, and is, poetical in the true
sense; and so, upon occasions, was the prose of Thackeray. Some
examples linger always in the memory, and dwell with their music in
the hearing. One I have quoted elsewhere; the passage in "The
Newcomes" where Clive, at the lecture on the Poetry of the Domestic
Affections, given by Sir Barnes Newcome, sees Ethel, whom he has
lost.

"And the past, and its dear histories, and youth and its hopes and
passions, and tones and looks, for ever echoing in the heart and
present in the memory--those, no doubt, poor Clive saw and heard as
he looked across the great gulf of time and parting and grief, and
beheld the woman he had loved for many years." "The great gulf of
time, and parting, and grief,"--some of us are on the farther side
of it, and our old selves, and our old happiness, and our old
affections beyond, grow near, grow clear, now and then, at the sight
of a face met by chance in the world, at the chance sound of a
voice. Such are human fortunes, and human sorrows; not the worst,
not the greatest, for these old loves do not die--they live in
exile, and are the better parts of our souls. Not the greatest, nor
the worst of sorrows, for shame is worse, and hopeless hunger, and a
life all of barren toil without distractions, without joy, must be
far worse. But of those myriad tragedies of the life of the poor,
Thackeray does not write. How far he was aware of them, how deeply
he felt them, we are not informed. His highest tragedy is that of
the hunger of the heart; his most noble prose sounds in that meeting
of Harry Esmond with Lady Castlewood, in the immortal speech which
has the burden, "bringing your sheaves with you!" All that scene
appears to me no less unique, no less unsurpassable, no less
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