of its mental and spiritual
sickness, its doubt, ennui, and melancholy. Yet beside such poems as
_Dover Beach_ and _Stagirius_ should be placed the lines from
_Westminster Abbey_:--

For this and that way swings
The flux of mortal things,
Though moving inly to one far-set goal.

Out of this entanglement and distraction Arnold turned for help to those
writers who seemed most perfectly to have seized upon the eternal
verities, to have escaped out of the storm of conflict and to have
gained calm and peaceful seats. Carlyle and Ruskin, Byron and Shelley,
were stained with the blood of battle, they raged in the heat of
controversy; Arnold could not accept them as his teachers. But the Greek
poets and the ancient Stoic philosophers have nothing of this dust and
heat about them, and to them Arnold turns to gather truth and to imitate
their spirit. Similarly, two poets of modern times, Goethe and
Wordsworth, have won tranquillity. They, too, become his teachers.
Arnold's chief guides for life are, then, these: two Greek poets,
Sophocles and Homer; two ancient philosophers, Marcus Aurelius and
Epictetus; two modern poets, Goethe and Wordsworth.

In Homer and Sophocles, Arnold sought what we may call the Greek spirit.
What he conceived this spirit to be as expressed in art, we find in the
essay on _Literature and Science_, "fit details strictly combined, in
view of a large general result nobly conceived." In Sophocles, Arnold
found the same spirit interpreting life with a vision that "saw life
steadily and saw it whole." In another Greek idea, that of fate, he is
also greatly interested, though his conception of it is modified by the
influence of Christianity. From the Greek poets, then, Arnold derived a
sense of the large part which destiny plays in our lives and the wisdom
of conforming our lives to necessity; the importance of conceiving of
life as directed toward a simple, large, and noble end; and the
desirability of maintaining a balance among the demands that life makes
on us, of adapting fit details to the main purpose of life.

Among modern writers Arnold turned first to Goethe, "Europe's sagest
head, Physician of the Iron Age." One of the things that he learned from
this source was the value of detachment. In the midst of the turmoil of
life, Goethe found refuge in Art. He is the great modern example of a
man who has been able to separate himself from the struggle of life and
watch it calmly.

He who