So in the sand lay Rustum by his son.
And night came down over the solemn waste,
And the two gazing hosts, and that sole pair,
And darken'd all; and a cold fog, with night,
Crept from the Oxus. Soon a hum arose,
As of a great assembly loosed, and fires
Began to twinkle through the fog; for now
Both armies moved to camp, and took their meal;
The Persians took it on the open sands
Southward, the Tartars by the river marge;
And Rustum and his son were left alone.

But the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved,
Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste,
Under the solitary moon;--he flow'd
Right for the polar star, past Orgunje,
Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin

[Illustration: RUSTUM SORROWS OVER SOHRAB]

To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcel'd Oxus strains along
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles--
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain cradle in Pamere,
A foil'd circuitous wanderer--till at last
The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.[204-27]

Matthew Arnold was one of England's purest and greatest men. As
scholar, teacher, poet and critic he labored zealously for the
betterment of his race and sought to bring them back to a clearer,
lovelier spiritual life and to win them from the base and sordid
schemes that make only for material success.

He was born in 1822 and was the son of Doctor Thomas Arnold, the
great teacher who was so long headmaster of the famous Rugby
school, and whose scholarly and Christian influence is so
faithfully brought out in Hughes's ever popular story _Tom Brown's
School Days_.

Matthew Arnold received his preparatory education in his father's
school at Rugby, and his college training at Oxford. He was always
a student and always active in educational work, as an inspector of
schools, and for ten years as professor of poetry at Oxford. He
twice visited the United States and both times lectured here. His
criticisms of America and Americans were severe, f