what days were those, Parmenides!
When we were young, when we could number friends
In all the Italian cities like ourselves,
When with elated hearts we join'd your train,
Ye Sun-born virgins! on the road of Truth.
Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought
Nor outward things were clos'd and dead to us,
But we receiv'd the shock of mighty thoughts
On simple minds with a pure natural joy;
And if the sacred load oppress'd our brain,
We had the power to feel the pressure eas'd.
The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,
In the delightful commerce of the world.
We had not lost our balance then, nor grown
Thought's slaves and dead to every natural joy.
The smallest thing could give us pleasure then--
The sports of the country people;
A flute note from the woods;
Sunset over the sea:
Seed-time and harvest;
The reapers in the corn;
The vinedresser in his vineyard;
The village-girl at her wheel.
Fullness of life and power of feeling, ye
Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,
Who dwell on a firm basis of content.
But he who has outliv'd his prosperous days,
But he, whose youth fell on a different world
From that on which his exil'd age is thrown;
Whose mind was fed on other food, was train'd
By other rules than are in vogue to-day;
Whose habit of thought is fix'd, who will not change,
But in a world he loves not must subsist
In ceaseless opposition, be the guard
Of his own breast, fetter'd to what he guards,
That the world win no mastery over him;
Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;
Who has no minute's breathing space allow'd
To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy:--
Joy and the outward world must die to him
As they are dead to me.

What freak of criticism can induce a man who has written such poetry
as this, to discard it, and say it is not poetry? Mr. Arnold is
privileged to speak of his own poems, but no other critic could speak
so and not be laughed at.

We are disposed to believe that no very sharp definition can be
given--at least in the present state of the critical art--of the
boundary line between poetry and other sorts of imaginative
delineation. Between the undoubted dominions of the two kinds there is
a debateable land; everybody is agreed that the _Oedipus at Colonus_
_is_ poetry: every one is agreed that the wonderful appea