be much affected, though it might lose a separable charm. For it
has everything--a sufficient scheme, a definite meaning and purpose, a
sustained and adequate command of poetical presentation, and passages
and phrases of the most exquisite beauty. Although it begins as a
pastoral, the mere traditional and conventional frippery of that form
is by no means so prominent in it as in the later (and, I think, less
consummate) companion and sequel _Thyrsis_. With hardly an
exception, the poet throughout escapes in his phraseology the two main
dangers which so constantly beset him--too great stiffness and too
great simplicity. His "Graian" personification is not overdone; his
landscape is exquisite; the stately stanza not merely sweeps, but
sways and swings, with as much grace as state. And therefore the
Arnoldian "note"--the special form of the _maladie du siecle_
which, as we have seen, this poet chooses to celebrate--acquires for
once the full and due poetic expression and music, both symphonic and
in such special clangours as the never-to-be-too-often-quoted
distich--

"Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade"--

which marks the highest point of the composition.

The only part on which there may be some difference between admirers
is the final simile of the Tyrian trader. This finishes off the piece
in nineteen lines, of which the poet was--and justly--proud, which are
quite admirable by themselves, but which cannot perhaps produce any
very clear evidences of right to be where they are. No ingenuity can
work out the parallel between the "uncloudedly joyous" scholar who is
bid avoid the palsied, diseased _enfants du siecle_, and the
grave Tyrian who was indignant at the competition of the merry Greek,
and shook out more sail to seek fresh markets. It is, once more,
simply an instance of Mr Arnold's fancy for an end-note of relief, of
cheer, of pleasant contrast. On his own most rigid principles, I fear
it would have to go as a mere sewn-on patch of purple: on mine, I
welcome it as one of the most engaging passages of a poem delightful
throughout, and at its very best the equal of anything that was
written in its author's lifetime, fertile as that was in poetry.

He himself, though he was but just over thirty when this poem
appeared, and though his life was to last for a longer period than had
passed since his birth to 1853, was to make few further contributions
to poetry itself. Th