t, and his poems have the
distance and repose and also the coldness that befit that sphere; and
the character of his imagination, which lays hold of form and reason,
makes natural to him the classical style.

It is obvious that the sources of his poetical culture are Greek. It is
not merely, however, that he takes for his early subjects Merope and
Empedocles, or that he strives in 'Balder Dead' for Homeric narrative,
or that in the recitative to which he was addicted he evoked an
immelodious phantom of Greek choruses; nor is it the "marmoreal air"
that chills while it ennobles much of his finest work. One feels the
Greek quality not as a source but as a presence. In Tennyson, Keats, and
Shelley, there was Greek influence, but in them the result was modern.
In Arnold the antiquity remains; remains in mood, just as in Landor it
remains in form. The Greek twilight broods over all his poetry. It is
pagan in philosophic spirit; not Attic, but of a later and stoical time,
with the very virtues of patience, endurance, suffering, not in their
Christian types, but as they now seem to a post-Christian imagination
looking back to the imperial past. There is a difference, it is true, in
Arnold's expression of the mood: he is as little Sophoclean as he is
Homeric, as little Lucretian as he is Vergilian. The temperament is not
the same, not a survival or a revival of the antique, but original and
living. And yet the mood of the verse is felt at once to be a
reincarnation of the deathless spirit of Hellas, that in other ages also
has made beautiful and solemn for a time the shadowed places of the
Christian world. If one does not realize this, he must miss the secret
of the tranquillity, the chill, the grave austerity, as well as the
philosophical resignation, which are essential to the verse. Even in
those parts of the poems which use romantic motives, one reason of their
original charm is that they suggest how the Greek imagination would have
dealt with the forsaken merman, the church of Brou, and Tristram and
Iseult. The presence of such motives, such mythology, and such Christian
and chivalric color in the work of Arnold does not disturb the simple
unity of its feeling, which finds no solvent for life, whatever its
accident of time and place and faith, except in that Greek spirit which
ruled in thoughtful men before the triumph of Christianity, and is still
native in men who accept the intellect as the sole guide of life.

It was