are apt to degenerate into mere bewailments. It is the part of a true and manly poet to raise us above these troubles. We seek him, not to be reminded of our shortcomings and imbecilities, but to be lifted into a clearer air, which may revive our spirit and purge our eyesight for a new and more vigorous contest in the dusty plain. And Mr. Arnold can do this for us if he will. His fine, often exquisite sense of beauty, his power of felicitous narration, his command over varied sentiment and feeling (he has not attempted the delineation of violent passion), open a field to him where he might occupy not only a high place, but one peculiarly his own. Wordsworth

and Tennyson have both left a tinge of their peculiar characteristics in the fountain of Mr. Arnold's poetry, and there is something very charming in having poems analogous to the short narrative or descriptive pieces in which Tennyson so often revels, less gorgeous and rich in their beauty, but at the same time less turbid and sensuous, and purified by something of the quieter insight and higher refinement of Wordsworth. They are like Greek wine mingled with water for a draught. In saying this, we might convey a false impression, if we did not add that Mr. Arnold is no mere compound; every thing he writes is perfectly his own; he has no trace of a copyist, his genius is truly original and individual, and the resemblances we advert to are, partly, only the legitimate and perfectly assimilated influences of minds with which he has come in contact, and yet more, perhaps, the traces of other influences so widely and subtilly dispersed that they may be called epidemic.

"Tristram and Iseult" is by far the most pleasing of these quasi narrative poems, and, on the whole, the best thing in these volumes. Sohrab and Rustum" is a fine poem, but less to our taste. Mr. Arnold's forte is description, but here there is a little too much of it. The poem is too long for the action: but throughout the diction is stately and sustained, and the ornament and

imagery rich, and in keeping with it. Yet it interests us more by the mode of its narration and its decorations, than by the inner kernel of sentiment and action. It is more like a fine carving than a good picture. One merit it has which is very rarely to be found in its author. It is conceived as a whole and executed as a whole, a poem -not a piece of joinery. We wish Mr. Arnold could be prevailed on to bestow more pains on some of the main requisites of his art. If he would read his own preface with attention, he might profit by some excellent observations contained in it. No man ever insisted more strongly on the excellence of wholeness and of a due subordination of details to the main composition, on the importance of the choice of a subject and the careful construction of the poem; few men have ever more systematically disregarded their own preaching. It is the one great and prominent defect of these poems that they give the reader no satisfaction as poems, but only scattered rays of enjoyment. Mr. Arnold's conceptions want force and unity; what is worse, they sometimes want substance. His minor poems especially, even when delighting us most, are apt to leave us with a sense of shortcoming, arising from the want of unity in their thought, or some hidden weakness in their conclusion. They are full of flaws. Take the following poem for an example:

"Yes; in the sea of life enisl'd,

With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.

The islands feel the enclasping flow,

And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens on starry nights
The nightingales divinely sing,
And lovely notes from shore to shore
Across the sounds and channels pour;

Oh, then a longing like despair,

Is to their farthest caverns sent;

-For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent.

Now round us spreads the watery plain-
Oh, might our marges meet again!
Who order'd that their longing's fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd?
Who renders vain their deep desire?

A God, a God their severance rul'd;
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea."

The main sentiment and the expression none will deny to possess beauty, but how abortive the conclusion ! To have our expectations raised by the queries in the last verse, and then to be put off with an indefinite deity repeated twice over, as if that solved the whole matterthis is a little too trying; not all the significance and rich cadence of the one last line can restore our equanimity. Again, in "Tristram and Iseult," it is wonderful how Mr. Arnold's sense of completeness could fail him so utterly as to allow him to conclude with a totally new and disconnected story lying at a tangent to the circle of his original one.

Hazlitt, speaking of painting, says that the "English school is distinguished by what are called ébauches, rude, violent attempts at effect, and a total inattention to the details or delicacy of finish." This is applicable to modern English poetry, and Mr. Arnold has done good service by the practical protest that his own poems afford against this hasty glaring style. He has both delicacy and purity of finish, and this is one thing which makes his book such agreeable reading. In this respect his classical education and tastes have stood him in good stead; and it is disappointing to find them exercising so disproportionately small an influence over the form of his conceptions and the choice of his subjects.

So fully is Mr. Arnold himself aware of the import

ance of this latter point, that he has excluded one of his larger poems from the last edition on the ground that the situation embodied in it is one from which no poetical enjoyment can be derived. Apropos of this, and of some difference with his critics, as to the field afforded by ancient subjects for the exercise of modern art, he has written a preface in which he develops a theory of poetry, defends the ancients as models for the artist, and rebukes the false pretensions of the age and of his own criticsbut distantly and politely. He is a little sore; but he keeps a steady countenance. "Non me tua turbida terrent dicta," he says; "Dii me terrent et Jupiter hostis." He is not afraid of them. We have as little respect for the critics as Mr. Arnold, perhaps less, and are quite at one with him as to the false pretensions of the present age; so we will confine ourselves to a few words upon the earlier part of his preface.

Here again it is the leading idea which appears to be defective, while the subordinate observations are many of them extremely just and valuable. His love for the Athenian Drama has misled Mr. Arnold. He has rightly pointed out its most prominent feature when he says that it delineates great actions. But he goes on 'to tell us that great actions can alone afford the subject-matter for excellent poetry. This is not so. It is the main defect of the Greek tragic art, the measure of its shortcoming, that it advanced thus far and no farther; that in its development it rigidly subordinated every thing to the delineation of some great action. This Mr. Arnold thinks its highest glory. He quotes Aristotle (as conclusively as a lawyer does Coke upon Littleton), to prove that our love of poetry is based on the pleasure we take in any imitation or representation whatever; a poetical representation, however, he says, must be one from which men can derive enjoyment, for Hesiod says that the Muses were born that they might be "a forgetfulness of evils, and a truce from cares;" and Schiller says that "All art

E

is dedicated to joy, and there is no higher and no more serious problem than how to make men happy." Thus it is required of the poet, that he should add not only to the knowledge but also to the happiness of men. The eternal objects of poetry, among all nations and at all times, Mr. Arnold goes on to say, are human actions. Hence the highest poetry concerns itself with the selection of such actions as in their delineation shall give the highest pleasure. Now all this appears to us narrow and false. It is a limitation necessarily required indeed, if we are to give the highest place in the history of poetic art to the Greek drama, but not otherwise. Without venturing to contradict Aristotle, we may certainly say that the poetic art is not limited to the representation of human actions, in however wide a sense we may employ the term. We have poems to the Lesser Celandine, to a Mouse, to the Skylark-nay, we have abundance of pieces which involve no picture of any thought or sentiment of the poet himself, but are purely descriptive of natural objects. Will it be said that the action here delineated is that of the poet in delineating? This is as if we should say the picture of a flower was the picture of the artist painting it; and, at any rate, we should then have in a poem whose subject is an action in the ordinary sense-two actions delineated, one the operation of the artist, the other the action he has chosen for his subject, and it is the latter alone with which we are now dealing. And an action is not only not the sole, it is not the highest, subject of the poetic art. Man is higher than his actions, and it is in the representation of the whole man that the romantic drama soars far beyond its classical rival. In Sophocles the action is predominant, and the characters are interesting as they elucidate it. In Shakspere the characters are predominant, and the events gain their main interest from the insight which, by their aid, the poet contrives to give us into some human heart. Types of passion and sentiment suf