ntly charged with suggested and allegoric meaning, is a noble
close to the poem which ends in it. The scale is large, and Arnold was
fond of a broad landscape, of mountains, and prospects over the land;
but one cannot fancy Wordsworth writing it. So too, on a small scale,
the charming scene of the English garden in 'Thyrsis' is far from
Wordsworth's manner:--

"When garden walks and all the grassy floor
With blossoms red and white of fallen May
And chestnut-flowers are strewn--
So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry,
From the wet field, through the vext garden trees,
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze."

This is a picture that could be framed: how different from Wordsworth's
"wandering voice"! Or to take another notable example, which, like the
Oxus passage, is a fine close in the 'Tristram and Iseult,'--the hunter
on the arras above the dead lovers:--

"A stately huntsman, clad in green,
And round him a fresh forest scene.
On that clear forest-knoll he stays,
With his pack round him, and delays.

* * * * *

The wild boar rustles in his lair,
The fierce hounds snuff the tainted air,
But lord and hounds keep rooted there.
Cheer, cheer thy dogs into the brake,
O hunter! and without a fear
Thy golden tasseled bugle blow"

But no one is deceived, and the hunter does not move from the arras, but
is still "rooted there," with his green suit and his golden tassel. The
piece is pictorial, and highly wrought for pictorial effects only,
obviously decorative and used as stage scenery precisely in the manner
of our later theatrical art, with that accent of forethought which turns
the beautiful into the aesthetic. This is a method which Wordsworth
never used. Take one of his pictures, the 'Reaper' for example, and see
the difference. The one is out-of-doors, the other is of the studio. The
purpose of these illustrations is to show that Arnold's nature-pictures
are not only consciously artistic, with an arrangement that approaches
artifice, but that he is interested through his eye primarily and not
through his emotions. It is characteristic of his temperament also that
he reminds one most often of the painter in water-colors.

If there is this difference between Arnold and Wordsworth in method, a
greater difference in spirit is to be anticipated. It is a fixed gulf.
In nature Wordsworth found th