proclaim their enmity--
Of toil unsever'd from tranquillity;
Of labour, that in lasting fruit outgrows
Far noisier schemes, accomplish'd in repose,
Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.

WORKS OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. We shall better appreciate Arnold's poetry if we
remember two things: First, he had been taught in his home a simple and
devout faith in revealed religion, and in college he was thrown into a
world of doubt and questioning. He faced these doubts honestly,
reverently,--in his heart longing to accept the faith of his fathers, but
in his head demanding proof and scientific exactness. The same struggle
between head and heart, between reason and intuition, goes on to-day, and
that is one reason why Arnold's poetry, which wavers on the borderland
between doubt and faith, is a favorite with many readers. Second, Arnold,
as shown in his essay on _The Study of Poetry_, regarded poetry as "a
criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws
of poetic truth and poetic beauty." Naturally, one who regards poetry as a
"criticism" will write very differently from one who regards poetry as the
natural language of the soul. He will write for the head rather than for
the heart, and will be cold and critical rather than enthusiastic.
According to Arnold, each poem should be a unit, and he protested against
the tendency of English poets to use brilliant phrases and figures of
speech which only detract attention from the poem as a whole. For his
models he went to Greek poetry, which he regarded as "the only sure
guidance to what is sound and true in poetical art." Arnold is, however,
more indebted than he thinks to English masters, especially to Wordsworth
and Milton, whose influence is noticeable in a large part of his poetry.

Of Arnold's narrative poems the two best known are _Balder Dead_ (1855), an
incursion into the field of Norse mythology which is suggestive of Gray,
and _Sohrab and Rustum_ (1853), which takes us into the field of legendary
Persian history. The theme of the latter poem is taken from the _Shah-
Namah_ (Book of Kings) of the Persian poet Firdausi, who lived and wrote in
the eleventh century.

Briefly, the story is of one Rustem or Rustum, a Persian Achilles, who fell
asleep one day when he had grown weary of hunting. While he slept a band of
robbers stole his favorite horse, Ruksh. In trailing the robbers Rustum
came to the palace of the king of Samengan, where