Armgart learns from her master, the old and noble Leo, that he had also been ambitious, that he had won only small success, and that he now lived for the sake of the good he could do to those about him.  He says to her,—­

             We must bury our dead joys,
  And live above them with a living world.

Then Armgart is brought to see that there is a noble privilege in living as her friend has lived, in making music a joy to others, and in doing what she can to make life better for humanity.

There are two very distinct ideas running through the poem, that a life guided by altruism is better than—­a merely artistic life, and that woman is to find in home and wedded joys that opportunity for the development of her soul, without which no artistic career can be complete.  The words of the Graf speak George Eliot’s own thought, that Armgart’s life and her art would have been both more perfect and more noble had she held all her art as attribute to the dear sovereignty of affection.

The same artistic conception pervades “The Legend of Jubal.”  That fame for which Jubal also yearns comes to him, he is taught, in the good which he leaves behind him for humanity to enjoy.  He dies, and ceases to be as a personal being.  At least this may be inferred from the concluding lines.

Quitting mortality, a quenched sun-wave,
The All-creating Presence for his grave.

A sun-wave while living, his being is now quenched.  But he lives on in the life of the race, lives on in man’s joy of music, in the deeper life which music awakens in all bosoms through all ages.  He is told that he has no need of—­

                      aught else for share
  Of mortal good, than in his soul to bear
  The growth of song, and feel the sweet unrest
  Of the world’s springtide in his conscious breast.

His own loved Past says to him,—­

This was thy lot, to feel, create, bestow,
And that immeasurable life to know
From which the fleshly self falls shrivelled, dead,
A seed primeval that has forests bred.

This poem views death as positivism conceives it, and gives a poetic interpretation of that subjective immortality, or that immortality in the race, in which George Eliot so heartily believed.  No other artistic presentation of this theory has ever been made which equals that given in this poem, and in the one beginning, “O may I join the choir invisible.”  This latter poem is not only beautiful in itself, but it has made altruism attractive and lovely.  Its tone of thought is elevated, its spirit lofty and noble, and its ideal pure and gracious.  All that can be said to make altruism lovely and winning, to inspire men with its spirit and motive, is here said.  The thought presented in these two poems is repeated in “The Death of Moses.”  Here we have Moses living forever in the human influence he created.