"The strange-scrawl'd rocks, the lonely sky."

These Mr. Harrison cites as proof that, "where Nature has withheld the
ear for music, no labour and no art can supply the want." And I think
that even a lover may add to the collection--

As the punt's rope chops round.

But, after all these deductions and qualifications have been made, it
remains true that Arnold was a poet, and that his poetic quality was
pure and rare. His musings "on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,"[2]
are essentially and profoundly poetical. They have indeed a tragic
inspiration. He is deeply imbued by the sense that human existence, at
its best, is inadequate and disappointing. He feels, and submits to, its
incompleteness and its limitations. With stately resignation he accepts
the common fate, and turns a glance of calm disdain on all endeavours
after a spurious consolation. All round him he sees

Uno'erleap'd Mountains of Necessity,
Sparing us narrower margin than we deem.

He dismissed with a rather excessive contempt the idea that the dreams
of childhood may be intimations of immortality; and the inspiration
which poets of all ages have agreed to seek in the hope of endless
renovation, he found in the immediate contemplation of present good.
What his brother-poet called "self-reverence, self-knowledge,
self-control," are the keynotes of that portion of his poetry which
deals with the problems of human existence. When he handles these
themes, he speaks to the innermost consciousness of his hearers, telling
us what we know about ourselves, and have believed hidden from all
others, or else putting into words of perfect suitableness what we have
dimly felt, and have striven in vain to utter. It is then that, to use
his own word, he is most "interpretative." It is this quality which
makes such poems as _Youth's Agitations_, _Youth and Calm_,
_Self-dependence_, and _The Grande Chartreuse_ so precious a part of our
intellectual heritage.

In 1873 he wrote to his sister: "I have a curious letter from the State
of Maine in America, from a young man who wished to tell me that a
friend of his, lately dead, had been especially fond of my poem, _A
Wish_, and often had it read to him in his last illness. They were both
of a class too poor to buy books, and had met with the poem in a
newspaper."

It will be remembered that in _A Wish_, the poet, contemptuously
discarding the conventional consolations of a death-bed, entreats his
friend