teresting _Modern Sappho_, almost the poet's
only experiment in "Moore-ish" method and melody--

"They are gone--all is still! Foolish heart, dost thou quiver?"--

is a curiosity rather than anything else. The style is ill suited to
the thought; besides, Matthew Arnold, a master at times of blank
verse, and of the statelier stanza, was less often an adept at the
lighter and more rushing lyrical measures. He is infinitely more at
home in the beautiful _New Sirens_, which, for what reason it is
difficult to discover, he never reprinted till many years later,
partly at Mr Swinburne's most judicious suggestion. The scheme is
trochaic, and Mr Arnold (deriving beyond all doubt inspiration from
Keats) was happier than most poets with that charming but difficult
foot. The note is the old one of yearning rather than passionate
melancholy, applied in a new way and put most clearly, though by no
means most poetically, in the lines--

"Can men worship the wan features,
The sunk eyes, the wailing tone,
Of unsphered, discrowned creatures,
Souls as little godlike as their own?"

The answer is, "No," of course; but, as some one informed Mr Arnold
many years later, we knew that before, and it is distressing to be
told it, as we are a little later, with a rhyme of "dawning" and
"morning." Yet the poem is a very beautiful one--in some ways the
equal of its author's best up to this time; at least he had yet done
nothing except the _Shakespeare_ sonnet equal to the splendid
stanza beginning--

"And we too, from upland valleys;"

and the cry of the repentant sirens, punished as they had sinned--

"'Come,' you say, 'the hours are dreary.'"

Yet the strong Tennysonian influence (which the poet rather
ungraciously kicked against in his criticism) shows itself here also;
and we know perfectly well that the good lines--

"When the first _rose_ flush was steeping
All the frore peak's _awful_ crown"--

are but an unconscious reminiscence of the great ones--

"And on the glimmering summit far withdrawn,
God made himself an _awful rose_ of dawn."

He kept this level, though here following not Tennyson or Keats but
Shelley, in the three ambitious and elaborate lyrics, _The Voice_, _To
Fausta_, and _Stagirius_, fine things, if somehow a little suggestive
of inability on their author's part fully to meet the demands of the
forms he attempts--"the note," in short, expressed practically as well
as in theory. _S