heavy burden of comparison.

Perhaps these last words may not unfairly hint at a defect--if not _the_
defect--of this refined, this accomplished, but this often disappointing
poetry. Quite early, in the preface before referred to, the poet had run
up and nailed to the mast a flag-theory of poetic art to which he always
adhered as far as theory went, and which it may be reasonably supposed
he always endeavoured to exemplify in practice. According to this "all
depends on the subject," and the fault of most modern poetry and of
nearly all modern criticism is that the poets strive to produce and the
critics expect to receive, not an elaborately planned and adjusted
treatment of a great subject, but touches or bursts of more or less
beautiful thought and writing. Now of course it need not be said that in
the very highest poetry the excellence of the subject, the complete
appropriateness of the treatment, and the beauty of patches and
passages, all meet together. But it will also happen that this is not
so. And then the poet of "the subject" will not only miss the happy
"jewels five words long," the gracious puffs and cat's paws of the wind
of the spirit, that his less austere brother secures, but will not make
so very much of his subjects, of his schemes of treatment themselves.
His ambition, as ambition so often does, will over-reach itself, and he
will have nothing to show but the unfinished fragments of a poetical
Escurial instead of the finished chantries and altar-tombs which a less
formal architect is able to boast.

However this may be, two things are certain, the first that the best
work of Matthew Arnold in verse bears a somewhat small proportion to the
work that is not his best, and that his worst is sometimes strangely
unworthy of him; the second, that the best where it appears is of
surpassing charm--uniting in a way, of which Andrew Marvell is perhaps
the best other example in English lyric, romantic grace, feeling, and
music to a classical and austere precision of style, combining nobility
of thought with grace of expression, and presenting the most
characteristically modern ideas of his own particular day with an almost
perfect freedom from the jargon of that day, and in a key always
suggesting the great masters, the great thinkers, the great poets of the
past. To those who are in sympathy with his own way of thinking he must
always possess an extraordinary attraction; perhaps he is not least,
though he may