who could describe the Roman noble's miserable

unrest so vividly :—

In his cool hall, with haggard eyes,

The Roman noble lay;

He drove abroad, in furious guise,
Along the Appian way.

He made a feast, drank fierce and fast,
And crowned his hair with flowers-
No easier nor no quicker passed
The impracticable hours;

-the poet who touched his highest, in passages of this kind, certainly could not boast that the fountain of his charm was love. It would be less untrue, though not true, to say that the fountain of Matthew Arnold's charm was lovableness, for certainly his poetry has in it a tenderness and lovableness which is a very different quality from love. Love is one thing, and lovableness another, and sometimes those who have most love seem on the surface to be least lovable, and vice versâ. Matthew Arnold is often lovable, lovable for his grace, his tenderness, his sedate purity, his tranquil and collected patience, his wistful regrets. But hardly anywhere does the secret of his charm seem to me to be the power of his love. He is serene, gentle, reasonable, gracious, with a keen eye for the cooler beauties of life, and a fine ear for all the flute-like voices of Nature; but he is not the poet of love, though he may be the poet of insight, and especially of insight into the faith that is seen in retrospect. For my own part, I should say that poetic charm has no single fountain,

but is almost as manifold in its secret sources as it is in its modes of expression,-being one thing in Homer, another in Dante, a third in Milton, a fourth in Shelley, and a multitude of separate things in Shakespeare.

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S LETTERS

MR. RUSSELL, in his graceful and skilful preface to his perhaps too copious collection of Matthew Arnold's letters, says with great truth that the charm of the poet's letters lies in their perfect naturalness. But he adds, with what seems to me less truth, that they are himself,-which does not seem quite adequate,-nay, they are, I think, a good deal less than himself, if Mr. Russell means by being "himself" that they give you the glow and the essence of the man. On the contrary, I should say that their charm is not at all up to the charm of his poetry; not at all up to the charm of his conversation. They are to those who knew him delightful letters, as recalling the man; but they do not fill you with the sense of buoyancy,-though often it was buoyant sadness, not buoyant joyousness, with which his poems fill you, or even with the sense of buoyancy with which his conversation filled you. They are, as most letters are, a good deal less than the man, not as a very few letters are, as Cowper's and Grey's letters have been, more than the man. More even in Cowper's case than his poems; or as some other letters-Mrs. Carlyle's for instance -have been, the letters of one in a specially exuberant frame of mind, filled with the exhilaration of

firing off a kind of volley of well-aimed shots which the reserve of ordinary social intercourse might have checked. There is no sense in reading Matthew Arnold's correspondence that the act of letterwriting stimulated and exalted him, and that is what we find with Cowper's letters and Grey's letters, and, so far as the stimulating goes, with Byron's letters (though in Byron's case the act of correspondence made him a different man, something of an actor as well as a correspondent). Matthew Arnold was not at his full height in letter-writing, as he was in writing his poems. His letters are pleasant, affectionate, wholly unaffected, but they are a faint reflection of the poet, and not even a bright or vivid reflection of his conversation. They are himself, a little subdued, not as the letters of a born letter-writer should be, himself a little exalted. Compare, for instance, what he says of the composition of that lovely little poem on his favourite dog's death, "Geist's Grave," in his letters, with what I heard him say of it in his conversation, and one misses at once the spring and emphasis and élan of his high-strung personality: :

My darling Boy :-I hoped to have sent you to-day my lines about your dear, dear little boy (Geist), but I have not yet been able to get a correct copy from the printer. You shall have it by next week's mail. At least, I hope so—and you will then get it a fortnight sooner than if we waited for the magazine containing it to be published. The daily miss of him will wear off, but we shall never forget him, and I am very glad to have stamped him in our memories by these lines, written when he was fresh in our minds. I like to think of all the newspapers having his dear little name in them when the Christmas number of The Fortnightly

Review is advertised, and I hope people will like the lines, and that will lead to his being more mentioned, and talked about, which seems to me a sort of continuation of him in life, dear little fellow, though it is but a hollow and shadowy one, alas !

That is simple and natural and fascinating. But those who heard him talk of the composition of that poem miss all the singular rapture of the manner in which he said, "I assure you I wrote it with the tears streaming down my face,” and with a simple sort of delight in the full consciousness of the emotion with which the mere attempt to recall the poor little dog's affectionateness and grace of manner had excited within him. Now any one who reads the poem will feel, just as those who heard Arnold speak of it would feel, that he did write it in a passion of tenderness and sorrow, in a sort of summer storm of the heart :

Only four years those winning ways,

Which make me for thy presence yearn,

Called us to pet thee or to praise,

Dear little friend! at every turn?

That loving heart, that patient soul,
Had they indeed no longer span,
To run their course, and reach their goal,
And read their homily to man?

That liquid, melancholy eye,

From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs

Seem'd surging the Virgilian cry,

The sense of tears in mortal things

That steadfast, mournful strain, consoled
By spirits gloriously gay,

And temper of heroic mould

What, was four years their whole short day?