Marguerite's anticipation of the renewed kiss is
fulfilled in the first stanzas. But the lover's anticipation, too, is
fulfilled, though as usual not quite as he made it; he wearies of his
restless and yet unmasterful passion; he rather muses and morals in
his usual key on the "way of a man with a maid" than complains or
repines. And then we go off for a time from Marguerite, though not
exactly from Switzerland, in the famous "_Obermann_" stanzas, a
variation of the Wordsworth memorial lines, melodious, but a very
little _impotent_--the English utterance of what Sainte-Beuve, I
think, called "the discouraged generation of 1850." Now mere
discouragement, except as a passing mood, though extremely natural, is
also a little contemptible--pessimism-and-water, mere peevishness to
the "fierce indignation," mere whining compared with the great ironic
despair. As for _Consolation_, which in form as in matter strongly
resembles part of the _Strayed Reveller_, I must say, at the risk of
the charge of Philistinism, that I cannot see why most of it should
not have been printed as prose. In fact, it would be a very bold and
astonishingly ingenious person who, not knowing the original,
perceived any verse-division in this--

"The bleak, stern hour, whose severe moments I would annihilate,
is passed by others in warmth, light, joy."

Nor perhaps can very much be said for some of the other things. The
sonnet afterwards entitled _The World's Triumphs_ is not strong;
_The Second Best_ is but "a chain of extremely valuable
thoughts"; _Revolution_ a conceit. _The Youth of Nature_ and
_The Youth of Man_ do but take up less musically the _threnos_ for
Wordsworth. But _Morality_ is both rhyme and poetry; _Progress_ is at
least rhyme; and _The Future_, though rhymeless again, is the best of
all Mr Arnold's waywardnesses of this kind. It is, however, in the
earlier division of the smaller poems--those which come between
_Empedocles_ and _Tristram_--that the interest is most concentrated,
and that the best thing--better as far as its subject is concerned
even than the _Summer Night_--appears. For though all does _not_
depend upon the subject, yet of two poems equally good in other ways,
that which has the better subject will be the better. Here we have the
bulk of the "Marguerite" or _Switzerland_ poems--in other words, we
leave the windy vagaries of mental indigestion and come to the real
things--Life and Love.

_The River_ does not nam