that, but yet Mr. Arnold's poetry has our love; his lines murmur
in our memory through all the stress and accidents of life. "The Scholar
Gipsy," "Obermann," "Switzerland," the melancholy majesty of the close of
"Sohrab and Rustum," the tenderness of those elegiacs on two kindred
graves beneath the Himalayas and by the Midland Sea; the surge and
thunder of "Dover Beach," with its "melancholy, long-withdrawing roar;"
these can only cease to whisper to us and console us in that latest hour
when life herself ceases to "moan round with many voices."

My friends tell me that Mr. Arnold is too doubting, and too didactic,
that he protests too much, and considers too curiously, that his best
poems are, at most, "a chain of highly valuable thoughts." It may be so;
but he carries us back to "wet, bird-haunted English lawns;" like him "we
know what white and purple fritillaries the grassy harvest of the river
yields," with him we try to practise resignation, and to give ourselves
over to that spirit

"Whose purpose is not missed,
While life endures, while things subsist."

Mr. Arnold's poetry is to me, in brief, what Wordsworth's was to his
generation. He has not that inspired greatness of Wordsworth, when
nature does for him what his "_lutin_" did for Corneille, "takes the pen
from his hand and writes for him." But he has none of the creeping prose
which, to my poor mind, invades even "Tintern Abbey." He is, as Mr.
Swinburne says, "the surest-footed" of our poets. He can give a natural
and lovely life even to the wildest of ancient imaginings, as to "these
bright and ancient snakes, that once were Cadmus and Harmonia."

Bacon speaks of the legends of the earlier and ruder world coming to us
"breathed softly through the flutes of the Grecians." But even the
Grecian flute, as in the lay of the strife of Apollo and Marsyas, comes
more tunably in the echo of Mr. Arnold's song, that beautiful song in
"Empedocles on Etna," which has the perfection of sculpture and the charm
of the purest colour. It is full of the silver light of dawn among the
hills, of the music of the loch's dark, slow waves among the reeds, of
the scent of the heather, and the wet tresses of the birch.

Surely, then, we have had great poets living among us, but the fountains
of their song are silent, or flow but rarely over a clogged and stony
channel. And who is there to succeed the two who are gone, or who shall
be our poet, if the Master be sil