of dead poets in 1834, they do not fall far short even in this
respect. And for adequacy of meaning, not unpoetically expressed, they
are almost supreme. If Mr Arnold's own unlucky and maimed definition
of poetry as "a criticism of life" had been true, they would be poetry
in quintessence; and, as it is, they are poetry.

Far more so is the glorious _Summer Night_, which came near the middle
of the book. There is a cheering doctrine of mystical optimism which
will have it that a sufficiently intense devotion to any ideal never
fails of at least one moment of consummate realisation and enjoyment.
Such a moment was granted to Matthew Arnold when he wrote _A Summer
Night_. Whether that rather vague life-philosophy of his, that
erection of a melancholy agnosticism _plus_ asceticism into a creed,
was anything more than a not ungraceful or undignified will-worship of
Pride, we need not here argue out. But we have seen how faithfully the
note of it rings through the verse of these years. And here it rings
not only faithfully, but almost triumphantly. The lips are touched at
last: the eyes are thoroughly opened to see what the lips shall speak:
the brain almost unconsciously frames and fills the adequate and
inevitable scheme. And, as always at these right poetic moments, the
minor felicities follow the major. The false rhymes are nowhere; the
imperfect phrases, the little sham simplicities or pedantries, hide
themselves; and the poet is free, from the splendid opening landscape
through the meditative exposition, and the fine picture of the
shipwreck, to the magnificent final invocation of the "Clearness
divine!"

His freedom, save once, is not so unquestionably exhibited in the
remarkable group of poems--the future constituents of the
_Switzerland_ group, but still not classified under any special
head--which in the original volume chiefly follow _Empedocles_, with
the batch later called "Faded Leaves" to introduce them. It is,
perhaps, if such things were worth attempting at all, an argument for
supposing some real undercurrent of fact or feeling in them, that they
are not grouped at their first appearance, and that some of them are
perhaps designedly separated from the rest. Even the name "Marguerite"
does not appear in _A Farewell_; though nobody who marked as well as
read, could fail to connect it with the _To my Friends_ of the former
volume. We are to suppose, it would appear, that the twelvemonth has
passed, and that