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drama, which, with Mr. Swinburne's _Atalanta in Calydon_ and
_Erechtheus_, is perhaps the best of a somewhat mistaken kind, for
Shelley's _Prometheus Unbound_ soars far above the kind itself. Official
duty first, and the growing vogue of his prose writing later, prevented
Mr. Arnold from issuing very many volumes of verse. But his _New Poems_
in 1867 made important additions, and in this way and that his poetical
production reached by the time of his death no inconsiderable
volume--perhaps five hundred pages averaging thirty lines each, or very
much more than has made the reputation of some English poets of very
high rank. Until late in his own life the general tendency was not to
take Mr. Arnold very seriously as a poet; and there are still those who
reproach him with too literary a character, who find fault with him as
thin and wanting in spontaneity. On the other hand, there are some who
not only think him happier in verse than in prose, but consider him
likely to take, when the "firm perspective of the past" has dispelled
mirages and false estimates, a position very decidedly on the right side
of the line which divides the great from the not great.

Family, local, and personal reasons (for Dr. Arnold had a house in the
immediate vicinity of Rydal), as well as the strong contemporary set in
favour of Wordsworth which prevailed in both universities between 1830
and 1845, caused Mr. Arnold early to take a distinctly Wordsworthian
bent. He was, later, somewhat outspoken in his criticism of Wordsworth's
weaker points; but it is impossible for any one to read his own poems
without perceiving that Arnold stands in a line of filiation from
Milton, with a slight deviation by way of Gray, through Wordsworth,
though with a strong personal element in his verse. This personal
element, besides other things, represents perhaps more powerfully than
it represents anything else, and than anything else represents this, a
certain reaction from the ornate and fluent Romanticism of the school of
Keats and Tennyson. Both, especially the latter, influenced Mr. Arnold
consciously and unconsciously. But consciously he was striving against
both to set up a neo-classic ideal as against the Romantic; and
unconsciously he was endeavouring to express a very decided, though a
perhaps not entirely genial or masculine, personal temperament. In other
words, Mr. Arnold is on one side a poet of "correctness"--a new
correctness as different from th