and flits about,
half-a-dozen different forms of verse. Now it is the equivalenced
octosyllable of the Coleridgean stamp rather than of Scott's or
Byron's; now trochaic decasyllabics of a rather rococo kind; and once
at least a splendid anapaestic couplet, which catches the ear and
clings to the memory for a lifetime--

"What voices are these on the clear night air?
What lights in the court? What steps on the stair?"

But the most interesting experiment by far is in the rhymed heroic,
which appears fragmentarily in the first two parts and substantively
in the third. The interest of this, which (one cannot but regret it)
Mr Arnold did not carry further, relapsing on a stiff if stately blank
verse, is not merely intrinsic, but both retrospective and
prospective. It is not the ordinary "stopped" eighteenth-century
couplet at all; nor the earlier one of Drayton and Daniel. It is the
"enjambed," very mobile, and in the right hands admirably fluent and
adaptable couplet, which William Browne and Chamberlayne practised in
the early and middle seventeenth century, which Leigh Hunt revived and
taught to Keats, and of which, later than Mr Arnold himself, Mr
William Morris was such an admirable practitioner. Its use here is
decidedly happy; and the whole of this part shows in Mr Arnold a
temporary Romantic impulse, which again we cannot but regret that he
did not obey. The picture-work of the earlier lines is the best he
ever did. The figure of Iseult with the White Hands stands out with
the right Prae-Raphaelite distinctness and charm; and the story of
Merlin and Vivian, with which, in the manner so dear to him, he
diverts the attention of the reader from the main topic at the end, is
beautifully told. For attaching quality on something like a large
scale I should put this part of _Tristram and Iseult_ much above both
_Sohrab and Rustum_ and _Balder Dead_; but the earlier parts are not
worthy of it, and the whole, like _Empedocles_, is something of a
failure, though both poems afford ample consolation in passages.

The smaller pieces, however, could have saved the volume had their
larger companions been very much weaker. The _Memorial Verses_ on
Wordsworth (published first in _Fraser_) have taken their place once
for all. If they have not the poetical beauty in different ways of
Carew on Donne, of Dryden on Oldham, even of Tickell upon Addison, of
_Adonais_ above all, of Wordsworth's own beautiful _Effusion_ on the
group