less for its own sake than because the promise it contained has been fulfilled.

Neither Wordsworth nor Mrs. Browning are much given to musings on the past, but not a few critics are of opinion that the Laureate's best title to fame rests precisely on his achievement in this field: and in this field also Matthew Arnold is undoubtedly at his best. Thyrsis' and 'Rugby Chapel' will live, though 'Sohrab and Rustum' and 'Merope' be forgotten. The sob of

'Break, break, break,

On thy cold grey stones, O sea,'

the sighing of 'Tears, idle tears,' the tender cadences and the proud restraint of In Memoriam,' will linger in the ears of man and in the hearts of the sorrow- laden, though Arthur and his knights should fade and vanish like the towers and pinnacles of Camelot.

As to the beauty of those two songs, 'wild with all regret' as they are, the most impatient critic can have no evil to say, save that they are deceptive and fatal siren-songs, the more demoralising for their alluring charm. And that is a criticism which time will assuredly cause the critic to swallow, with apologies, and with gratitude to the poet for having given such perfect expression to feelings that sooner or later, though it may be for a short time only, we all must own to. And at such times it is better to let the tears flow.

Tennyson has his bits of dramatic retrospection, too. The hero of Locksley Hall' moralises sixty years after, very much as one would have expected. As the young man had a general opinion that he and his contemporaries held the key of all progress, so the old one thinks that progress became a headlong rush down-hill when he ceased to take-or fancy he was taking -an active part in it. The octogenarian prophet of pessimism has usually started life as a revolutionary. We are so prone to generalise from our personal disappointments. The spinster with her Tommies is a very different kind of person, whose mind dwells on casual events, which she reverts to with a humorous enjoyment and without regret. Laurence Aylmer's reminiscences have their tinge of sadness, such as is awakened in every one who looks upon the scenes from which the old familiar faces have gone for ever; but there are more smiles than tears in the poem. The hero of the 'Gardener's Daughter'

is capable of making the assertion that those old Mays had thrice the life of these '-a conviction which most folks attain to some time or other, only we date the old Mays' differently. These are all individual moods, however. The mood of the songs is universal, inasmuch as it comes upon all men, and not once only in a lifetime to most.

One sometimes wonders, in reading Matthew Arnold's poems, whether he ever was really young at all-young and foolish. Everything he wrote bears such an impress of trained gravity. He is more like Laurence Aylmer than anything else in Tennyson. In his elegiac poems, as in those which are more or less dramatic, there is no note of passion, no wildness of regret. Once or twice, as in the poem called 'Growing Old,' there is a bitter taste of dust and ashes; but usually, when he turns to the past, it is to dwell with serene melancholy on the disillusionment that years have brought-to contrast the bright dreams of yore with the fading hopes of to-day. When he retraces the paths on which he had rambled with Thyrsis,' the change that most impresses him is that now

'Long the way appears which seemed so short
To the less practised eye of sanguine youth;
And high the mountain tops, in cloudy air,
The mountain-tops where is the throne of Truth,
Tops in life's morning-sun so bright and bare!
Unbreachable the fort

Of the long-battered world uplifts its wall;

And strange and vain the earthly turmoil grows,
And near and real the charm of thy repose,
And night as welcome as a friend would fall.'

Now the young man or maiden who is prepared to echo the sentiment of those lines, as a matter of his or her own personal experience, must be either out of sorts, or the victim of some kind of intellectual malady. When

'round us too the night

In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade,'

it is another matter. When we have been through the brunt of the battle, it is legitimate to say we are tired. But when we have got the brunt of the battle in front of us, it is unwise to remind ourselves too often that it's going to be a very fatiguing affair. It is better to risk disappointment at the end than to be disheartened at the outset. If, to escape the pain of disillusion,

we steadily decline the joy of anticipation, we are no very great gainers. Hope to-day is not merely the source of bitterness to-morrow. There are some folks who reach their fourscore years without being disillusioned at all. There are different ways of taking experience. You may

'Welcome each rebuff

That turns earth's smoothness rough,'

though it is an uncommonly difficult thing to do. Or you may take the rebuff with a shrug, and say it was only what you ought to have expected. Or you may cry out against fate for having raised your hopes only to dash them, regarding your woes as a specially-designed insult to your important personality, like Marie Bashkertseff. But there is no doubt which course of the three is the noblest-and the hardest.

It would seem that it is precisely this absence of passion, this austere serenity, which constitutes the fascination exercised over certain minds by Arnold's poems, coupled with their scholarly manner and purity of expression. One reason, perhaps, why this is the case may be found in the very opposite character of so much of the contemporary poetry which found admirers-never perhaps very numerous, but vehemently enthusiastic; poetry which was emotional and glowing, whatever its faults were, to a somewhat fatiguing degree. One can imagine people turning from that overheated, scent-laden atmosphere with a sense of relief to this clear still air, finding their sense of form, their literary desires, satisfied without being called upon to feel any exciting emotions, their consciousness of the inefficiency of mortal things confirmed without bitterness and with a calm which is very nearly cheerful. But it is the sort of thing which must appeal mainly to people who are tired, whether from the exhaustion of some struggle brief but fierce, or from the weariness of long endurance, or from a certain moral lassitude. To admire, even to sympathise with it, is one thing; to turn to it habitually for consolation is another. It makes looking forward the reverse of attractive, whereas it is best for us to go on looking forward until the play is played out. This attitude is all very well if we have found life bitter; to adopt it perhaps gives us a certain sense of superiority to illusion if we have found life sweet; but it will not help us much towards making it sweeter.

Therefore I find in 'Rugby Chapel' a higher note than in Thyrsis,' despite the superiority of poetical form in the latter

poem, or in 'Empedocles,' though there the dramatic fitness of the thoughts justifies them. It is one thing to take joy in thoughts for their own sake, and another to find satisfaction in seeing what a particular person will think under given circumstances. In 'Rugby Chapel,' however, the memory of a heroic spirit triumphs over egotistic melancholy, and for once we have a poem in which hope predominates-hope derived from the thought of those

'Souls tempered with fire,

Fervent, heroic, and good,

Helpers and friends of mankind;

Who move through the ranks, recall
The stragglers, refresh the outworn,

Praise, re-inspire the brave!
Order, courage, return.
Eyes rekindling, and prayers
Follow your steps as ye go.
Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march,
On, to the bound of the waste,
On, to the city of God.'

The son may help us to put up with life, but the father helped men to make it.

The Laureate's greatest work—if one may speak as if the relative merits of his greater works can be yet decided—is altogether different in tone. For the key to it is distinctly the loss of an individual friend, whereas, in Thyrsis,' Arnold's 'In Memoriam A. H. Clough,' the loss of the individual friend is very much less prominent than the general idea of change. With Tennyson the one face that he loved most is gone for ever, and every thought turns on that. Change for itself is the thing that the Oxford poet mourns, and loss of a friend as part of the change. It is in the hour of overwhelming grief that 'In Memoriam' appeals to us most of all; Thyrsis' is rather the expression of a general weariness to which a particular occasion has given voice. If I should attempt to pick out the verses on which the whole argument of 'In Memoriam' hangs, they would be these:

:

'VI.

O, what to her shall be the end?
And what to me remains of good?
To her, perpetual maidenhood,

And unto me no second friend.

It is not, therefore, a poem expressing the feeling aroused by contemplation of the past generally, but of the past as associated with one particular person, never again to be seen on this side of the gates of death; the cry of bereavement, not of disappointment; the voice of weakness, but of one crying for the light, and trusting that the light will come.

To one who has never known such a loss it will be easy to join with the critic, and say—

'This fellow would make weakness weak,

And melt the waxen hearts of men.'

To whom the answer is given very sufficiently:

'Behold, ye speak an idle thing:

Ye never knew the sacred dust.

Another, to whom the poet's faith, sustaining him through his grief, is a vain thing, may speak impatiently, saying that such consolation is as a house built upon the sand-empty and deceptive as a bubble; that it is better to face the worst and harden your heart. And indeed, if the poet's faith be vain, that would seem to be about the best thing to be done, only it would have been as well to begin hardening your heart beforehand,

But to one to whom comes such and so great a loss, a loss which for the time empties the world of light-to whom the faith has been given, but for whom, at the time, it seems to be swallowed up in the darkness-to such a one the knowledge that another has borne the like grief, has given it such expression, and has held fast to the faith through it, is a source of unspeakable consolation. When as yet the pain is too recent and too keen for him to hail it as a message from Heaven, to welcome it as the sting that bids not sit nor stand, but go,' he will find