1 his subjects are limited to those which can be treated with so fine a pencil and so transparent a style as his. Thought is always uppermost in his mind. His observation itself is always tranquil and full of the definiteness of intellectual discrimination. He never breaks out into singing or wailing like Shelley. He never masses his colours with the force and passion of Byron. He never mixes his effects with the lavish hand of Tennyson, so as almost to bewilder you with the multiplicity and variety of impressions. He keeps in one stratum, the intellectual and reflective stratum, even in his narrative poems. He is animated by one predominating emotion, the emotion of a sort of grandiose spiritual compassion. So far as he has a clear affinity with any of the greater poets of England, it is obvious that his affinity is with Wordsworth ; and that, though he has not Wordsworth's rapture or Wordsworth's sublimity, he has learnt more from Wordsworth than from any other, while he has brought to the treatment of Wordsworth's themes a more delicate and tender workmanship, a greater richness and subtlety of intellect, a considerable narrative power, of which Wordsworth can hardly be said to have possessed even the germs, and a much larger historical and philosophical horizon. Still, Wordsworth was and doubtless will continue to be recognised as a poet of much greater weight of natural genius, of far more hardy power, of far deeper impulses. Mr. Arnold can hardly be called a true disciple of Wordsworth, deeply as he has drunk at the spring of Wordsworth's genius. It may be said of him that he has been fascinated and charmed by Wordsworth's thoughts, without being truly conquered by them; that he has been diverted from his intellectual troubles by Wordsworth, but has failed to be consoled. He says of Wordsworth in the beautiful memorial verses transferred to this little volume : And Wordsworth !—Ah, pale ghosts, rejoice! Ah, may ye feel his voice as we ! Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears. He spoke, and loosed our hearts in tears. On the cool flowery lap of earth, Our youth returned; for there was shed But that, eloquent as it is, is not the kind of way in which Wordsworth himself would have wished to be commemorated. He would have regarded the faint classical hope expressed on behalf of the "pale ghosts" as utterly removed from the school of his hardy and humble though buoyant faith. He would not have desired his poetry to be looked upon as an alleviation of human lots, -as a sweet interlude in the iron courts of human destiny,— but rather as the announcement of one who had discerned with prophetic glance the ultimate divinity of this unintelligible world. He went about with deep exultation in his heart, not, like Mr. Arnold, with an exalted compassion and a serene fortitude. Where Wordsworth said "rejoice,” Mr. Arnold says "endure." While Wordsworth's rapture was the rapture of illumination from the source of all light, Mr. Arnold's is but an ambiguous and hesitating joy in the buoyancy of his own soul. The affinities of Mr. Arnold with Wordsworth, and the still graver contrasts between them, will not be adequately seen by the readers of this little volume of Selections" only. It is in such poems as Resignation," "The Youth of Nature," and the two fine poems on the author of "Obermann" that Mr. Arnold's true philosophy, his rejection of Wordsworth, his relegation of Wordsworth to the position of a poet who charms us chiefly by ignoring "the half of human fate," is to be found. Still, Mr. Arnold can never be understood by one who has not grasped his relation to Wordsworth, his deep delight in Wordsworth, his long study of him, and his fundamental rejection of him. 66 66 On the whole, I should say that Mr. Arnold will live in English literature as one who recalls Gray by his cool, pure, and delicate workmanship; Newman by the severe and lucid sharpness of his outlines; and who represents a survival from the school of Wordsworth, having carried off from it a good deal of its habit of thought and buoyancy of feeling, while rejecting its main current of meditative faith. In the delineation of human passion, Mr. Arnold has limited himself almost to a single phase of it, but in the delineation of that phase he is supreme. No English poet ever painted so powerfully the straining of emotion against the reins of severe intellectual repression. In Mr. Arnold there is a deep love of excitement, and a deep fear of it, always struggling. He may be said to have gained his reputation as a poet by the vigour with which he paints the conflict. I staunch with ice my burning breast, With silence balm my whirling brain, might almost be transferred from one of his poems to the title-page, as the motto of his whole poetry, both narrative and reflective. T POETIC CHARM MR. E. R. RUSSELL, the editor of the Liverpool Daily Post, whose critical essays often evince a delicate subtlety as well as a keen insight, has just printed a paper on Matthew Arnold, read before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, of which I will venture to say that it is nearer to the kind of paper which one might have expected Matthew Arnold to write upon his own prose works, if he had had (as perhaps he had) the detachment of mind to put himself at a distance from his own thought, than anything else on the critic whom we have lost, that has come under my notice. Mr. Russell quotes from some former criticism of his own on Matthew Arnold, which I have never had the good fortune to meet with, some strictures on "the lack of energy and climax" in Matthew Arnold, on "the curious absence of strong flow in the ripples of his pellucidity," on "his resigned sequesterment from the broad channels of life and action," and on "the too negative quality of his lucidity," all sound criticisms, but all, I think, directed rather to Matthew Arnold's prose than to his poetry; and I confess that, for my own part, I would not buy all the prose Matthew Arnold ever wrote, including even the finest of his Essays in |