e one spirit's "plastic stress," and a near
and intimate revelation to the soul of truths that were his greatest joy
and support in existence. Arnold finds there no inhabitancy of God, no
such streaming forth of wisdom and beauty from the fountain heads of
being; but the secret frame of nature is filled only with the darkness,
the melancholy, the waiting endurance that is projected from himself:--

"Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread,
The solemn hills about us spread,
The stream that falls incessantly,
The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky,
If I might lend their life a voice,
Seem to bear rather than rejoice."

Compare this with Wordsworth's 'Stanzas on Peele Castle,' and the
important reservations that must be borne in mind in describing Arnold
as a Wordsworthian will become clearer. It is as a relief from thought,
as a beautiful and half-physical diversion, as a scale of being so vast
and mysterious as to reduce the pettiness of human life to
nothingness,--it is in these ways that nature has value in Arnold's
verse. Such a poet may describe natural scenes well, and obtain by means
of them contrast to human conditions, and decorative beauty; but he does
not penetrate nature or interpret what her significance is in the human
spirit, as the more emotional poets have done. He ends in an antithesis,
not in a synthesis, and both nature and man lose by the divorce. One
looks in vain for anything deeper than landscapes in Arnold's treatment
of nature; she is emptied of her own infinite, and has become
spiritually void: and in the simple great line in which he gave
the sea--

"The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea--"

he is thinking of man, not of the ocean: and the mood seems ancient
rather than modern, the feeling of a Greek, just as the sound of the
waves to him is always Aegean.

In treating of man's life, which must be the main thing in any poet's
work, Arnold is either very austere or very pessimistic. If the feeling
is moral, the predominant impression is of austerity; if it is
intellectual, the predominant impression is of sadness. He was not
insensible to the charm of life, but he feels it in his senses only to
deny it in his mind. The illustrative passage is from 'Dover Beach':--

"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neithe