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So was the hush;" the honey-dropping trochees of the _New Sirens_; the description of the poet in _Resignation_; the outburst-- "What voices are these on the clear night air?" of _Tristram and Iseult_; the melancholy meditation of _A Summer Night_ and _Dover Beach_, with the plangent note so cunningly yet so easily accommodated to the general tone and motive of the piece,--these and a hundred other things fulfil all the requirements of the true poetic criticism, which only marks, and only asks for, the _differentia_ of poetry. And this poetic moment--this (if one may use the words, about another matter, of one who wrote no poetry, yet had more than all but three or four poets), this "exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, and ingression into the divine shadow" which poetry and poetry alone confers upon the fit readers of it--is never far off or absent for long together in Mr Arnold's verse. His command of it is indeed uncertain. But all over his work, from _The Strayed Reveller_ to _Westminster Abbey_, it may happen at any minute, and it does happen at many minutes. This is what makes a poet: not the most judicious selection of subject, not the most studious contemplation and, as far as he manages it, representation of the grand style and the great masters. And this is what Mr Arnold has. That his prose, admirable as it always is in form and invaluable as it often is in matter, is on the whole inferior to his verse, is by no means a common opinion, though it was expressed by some good judges both during his life and at the time of his death. As we have seen, both from a chance indication in his own letters and from Mr Humphry Ward's statement, he took very great pains with it; indeed, internal evidence would be sufficient to establish this if we had no positive external testimony whatsoever. He came at a fortunate time, when the stately yet not pompous or over-elaborated model of the latest Georgian prose, raised from early Georgian "drabness" by the efforts of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke, but not proceeding to the extremes of any of the three, was still the academic standard; but when a certain freedom on the one side, and a certain grace and colour on the other, were being taken from the new experiments of nineteenth-century prose proper. Whether he or his contemporary Mr Froude was the greatest master of this particular blend is a question which no doubt had best be answered by
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