ull and constant tide of
inspiration is imperative; it will not be denied; it may kill the poet
if he cannot or will not give vent to it, but it will not be patient
of repression--quietly content to appear now and then, even on such
occasions as the deaths of a Clough and a Stanley. Nor is it against
charity or liberality, while it is in the highest degree consonant
with reason and criticism, to infer that Mr Arnold's poetic vein was
not very full-blooded, that it was patient of refusal to indulge it,
that his poetry, in nearly the happiest of his master's phrases, was
not exactly "inevitable," despite the exquisiteness of its quality on
occasion.

It is fortunate for the biographer that this earliest part of Mr
Arnold's life is so fertile in poetry, for otherwise, in the dearth of
information, it would be a terribly barren subject. The thirty years
of life yield us hardly twenty pages of letters, of which the first,
with its already cited sketch of Laleham, is perhaps the most
interesting. At the Trafalgar Square riots of March 1848 the writer is
convinced that "the hour of the hereditary peerage and eldest sonship
and immense properties has struck"; sees "a wave of more than American
vulgarity, moral, intellectual, and social, preparing to break over
us"; and already holds that strange delusion of his that "the French
are the most civilised of European peoples." He develops this on the
strength of "the intelligence of their idea-moved classes" in a letter
to his sister; meets Emerson in April; goes to a Chartist
"convention," and has a pleasant legend for Miss Martineau that the
late Lord Houghton "refused to be sworn in as a special constable,
that he might be free to assume the post of President of the Republic
at a moment's notice." He continues to despair of his country as
hopelessly as the Tuxford waiter;[6] finds Bournemouth "a very stupid
place"--which is distressing; it is a stupid place enough now, but it
was not then: "a great moorland covered with furze and low pine coming
down to the sea" could never be that--and meets Miss Bronte, "past
thirty and plain, with expressive grey eyes though." The rest we must
imagine.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The editor glosses this variously spelt and etymologically
puzzling word "landing-stage." But unless I mistake, a "kempshott,"
"campshed," or "campshedding" is not a landing-stage (though it helps
to make one) so much as a river-wall of stakes and planks, put to
guard the