nscendence: he meditates more than he feels. And that function
of the riddle of the painful earth which Lucretius, thousands of years
ago, put in his grim _Nequicquam!_ which one of Mr Arnold's own
contemporaries formulated with less magnificence and more popularity,
but still with music and truth in _Strangers Yet_--here receives
almost its final poetical expression. The image--the islands in the
sea--is capitally projected in the first stanza; it is exquisitely
amplified in the second; the moral comes with due force in the third;
and the whole winds up with one of the great poetic phrases of the
century--one of the "jewels five [literally five!] words long" of
English verse--a phrase complete and final, with epithets in unerring
cumulation--

"The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea."

_Human Life_, no ill thing in itself, reads a little weakly after
_Isolation_; but _Despondency_ is a pretty piece of melancholy, and,
with a comfortable stool, will suit a man well. In the sonnet, _When I
shall be divorced_, Mr Arnold tried the Elizabethan vein with less
success than in his Shakespeare piece; and _Self-Deception_ and _Lines
written by a Death-Bed_, with some beauty have more monotony. The
closing lines of the last are at the same time the moral of the book
and the formula of the Arnoldian "note"--

"Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.
'Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
But 'tis not what our youth desires."

Again, we remember some one's parody-remonstrance thirty years later,
and again we may think that the condemnation which Mr Arnold himself
was soon to pronounce upon _Empedocles_ is rather disastrously
far-reaching, while even this phrase is a boomerang. Musical and
philosophical despair is one of the innumerable strings of the poetic
lyre; but 'tis not what our youth, or our age either, desires for a
monochord.

The remarkable manifesto just referred to was not long delayed.
Whatever may have been his opinion as to the reception of the two
volumes "by A," he made up his mind, a year after the issue and
withdrawal of the second, to put forth a third, with his name, and
containing, besides a full selection from the other two, fresh
specimens of the greatest importance. In the two former there had been
no avowed "purpose"; here, not merely were the contents sifted on
principle, the important _Empedocles_ as well as some minor
things being omitted: not merely did some of the new numbers,
especia