tagirius_ in particular wants but a very little to be
a perfect expression of the obstinate questionings of the century; and
yet wanting a little, it wants so much! Others, _To a Gipsy Child_ and
_The Hayswater Boat_ (Mr Arnold never reprinted this), are but faint
Wordsworthian echoes; and thus we come to _The Forsaken Merman_.

It is, I believe, not so "correct" as it once was to admire this; but
I confess indocility to correctness, at least the correctness which
varies with fashion. _The Forsaken Merman_ is not a perfect poem--it
has _longueurs_, though it is not long; it has those inadequacies,
those incompetences of expression, which are so oddly characteristic
of its author; and his elaborate simplicity, though more at home here
than in some other places, occasionally gives a dissonance. But it is
a great poem--one by itself, one which finds and keeps its own place
in the foreordained gallery or museum, with which every true lover of
poetry is provided, though he inherits it by degrees. No one, I
suppose, will deny its pathos; I should be sorry for any one who fails
to perceive its beauty. The brief picture of the land, and the fuller
one of the sea, and that (more elaborate still) of the occupations of
the fugitive, all have their own charm. But the triumph of the piece
is in one of those metrical _coups_ which give the triumph of all the
greatest poetry, in the sudden change from the slower movements of the
earlier stanzas or strophes to the quicker sweep of the famous
conclusion--

"The salt tide rolls seaward,
Lights shine from the town"--

to

"She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea."

Here the poet's poetry has come to its own.

_In Utrumque Paratus_ sounds the note again, and has one exceedingly
fine stanza:--

"Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow,
And faint the city gleams;
Rare the lone pastoral huts--marvel not thou!
The solemn peaks but to the stars are known,
But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams;
Alone the sun arises, and alone
Spring the great streams."

But _Resignation_, the last poem in the book, goes far higher. Again,
it is too long; and, as is not the case in the _Merman_, or even in
_The Strayed Reveller_ itself, the _general_ drift of the poem, the
allegory (if it be an allegory) of the two treadings of "the self-same
road" with Fausta and so forth, is unnecessarily obscure, and does not
tempt one to spend much trouble in penetratin