" a collection much
rehandled in the successive editions of Mr. Arnold's work, and
exceedingly unequal, but containing, in the piece which begins--

Yes! in the sea of life enisled,

one of the noblest poems of its class which the century has produced;
the mono-dramatic "Strayed Reveller," which as mentioned above is one of
the very earliest of all; and the more fully dramatised and longer
"Empedocles on Etna," in regard to which Mr. Arnold showed a singular
vacillation, issuing it, withdrawing nearly all of it, and than issuing
it again. Its design, like that of the somewhat later "Merope," is not
of the happiest, but it contains some lyrical pieces which are among
the best-known and the best of their author's work. Early too, if not of
the earliest, are certain longer narrative or semi-narrative poems, not
seldom varied with or breaking into lyric--"Sohrab and Rustum" with
another of the fine closes referred to, perhaps indeed the finest of
all; "The Sick King in Bokhara"; "Balder Dead"; "Tristram and Iseult";
"The Scholar-Gipsy," a most admirable "poem of place," being chiefly
devoted to the country round Oxford; "Thyrsis" (an elegy on Clough which
by some is ranked not far below _Lycidas_ and _Adonais_). But perhaps
Mr. Arnold's happiest vein, like that of most of the poets of the last
two-thirds of the century, lay, not in long poems but in shorter pieces,
more or less lyrical in form but not precisely lyrics--in short of the
same general class (though differing often widely enough in subject and
handling) as those in which the main appeal of Tennyson himself has been
said to consist. Such is "The Forsaken Merman," the poet's most original
and perhaps most charming if not his deepest or most elaborate thing--a
piece of exquisite and passionate music modulated with art as touching
as it is consummate; "Dover Beach," where the peculiar religious
attitude, with the expression of which so much of Mr. Arnold's prose is
concerned, finds a more restrained and a very melodious voice; the
half-satiric, half-meditative "Bacchanalia"; the fine "Summer Night";
the Memorial Verses (Mr. Arnold was a frequent and a skilled attempter
of epicedes) on Wordsworth, on Heine, and on the dog _Geist_; with,
almost latest of all and not least noble, "Westminster Abbey," the
opening passages of which vie in metre (though of a more complicated
mould) and in majesty with Milton's "Nativity Ode," and show a wonderful
ability to bear this