"Like us, the lightning fires

Love to have scope and play;

The stream, like us, desires
An unimpeded way;

Like us, the Libyan wind delights to roam at large.

"Streams will not curb their pride

The just man not to entomb,
Nor lightnings go aside

To leave his virtues room;

Nor is that wind less rough which blows a good man's barge.

"Nature, with equal mind,

Sees all her sons at play;

Sees man control the wind,

The wind sweep man away:

Allows the proudly-riding and the founder'd bark."

Again, there are "the ill-deeds of other men" to fill up the account against us of painful and perilous things. And we, instead of doing and bearing all we can under our conditions of life, must needs "cheat our pains" like children after a fall who "rate the senseless ground: "

"So, loth to suffer mute,

We, peopling the void air,
Make gods to whom to impute
The ills we ought to bear;

With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily.

"Yet grant-as sense long miss'd

Things that are now perceiv'd,

And much may still exist

Which is not yet believ'd

Grant that the world were full of Gods we cannot see;

"All things the world which fill

Of but one stuff are spun,

That we who rail are still,

With what we rail at, one;

One with the o'er-labour'd Power that through the breadth and

length

Of earth, and air, and sea,

In men, and plants, and stones,

Hath toil perpetually,

And struggles, pants, and moans;

Fain would do all things well, but sometimes fails in strength.

"This is not what man hates,

Yet he can curse but this.
Harsh Gods and hostile Fates

Are dreams; this only is ;

Is everywhere; sustains the wise, the foolish elf.”

Again, we must have comfortable Gods to bless, as well as these discomfortable to curse; "kind Gods who perfect what man vainly tries;" we console ourselves for long labour and research and failure by trust in their sole and final and sufficient knowledge. Then comes the majestic stroke of reply to rebuke and confute the feeble follies of inventive hope, the futile forgeries of unprofitable comfort; scornful and solemn as the forces themselves of

nature.

"Fools! that in man's brief term

He cannot all things view,

Affords no ground to affirm
That there are Gods who do ;

Nor does being weary prove that he has where to rest."

In like manner, when pleasure-seekers fail of pleasure in this world, they turn their hearts Godward, and thence in the end expect that joy which the world could not give; making sure to find happiness where the foiled student makes sure to find knowledge. Again the re

sponse from natural things unseen, or from the lips of their own wisest, confronts their fancies as before.

"Fools! that so often here

Happiness mocked our prayer,

I think, might make us fear

A like event elsewhere;

Make us, not fly to dreams, but moderate desire."

Nor finally, when all is said, need the wise despair or repine because debarred from dreams of a distant and dubious happiness in a world outside of ours.

"Is it so small a thing

To have enjoyed the sun,

To have lived light in the spring,

To have loved, to have thought, to have done?"

The poorest villager feels that it is not so small a thing that he should not be loth to lose the little that life can yield him. Let the wiser man, like him, trust without fear the joys that are; life has room for effort and enjoyment, though at sight of the evil and sorrow it includes one may have abjured false faith and foolish hope and fruitless fear.

The majesty and composure of thought and verse, the perfect clearness and competence of words, distinguish this from other poetry of the intellect now more approved and applauded. The matter or argument is not less deep and close than clear and even in expression; although this lucidity and equality of style may diminish its material value in eyes used to the fog and ears trained to the clatter of the chaotic school. But a poem throughout so flowerless and pallid would miss much of the common charm of poetry, however imbued with the serene and

severe splendour of snows and stars. And the special crown and praise of this one is its fine and gentle alternation of tone and colour. All around the central peak, bathed in airs high as heaven and cloven with craters deep as hell, the tender slopes of hill and pasture close up and climb in gradual grace of undulation, full of sunbeams and murmurs, winds and birds. The lyric interludes of the " 'Empedocles" are doubtless known by heart to many ignorant of their original setting, in which they are now again enchased. We have no poet comparable for power and perfection of landscape. This quality was never made more of by critics, sought after by poets with so much care; and our literature lies in full flowerage of landscape, like Egypt after the reflux of the Nile. We have galleries full of beautiful and ingenious studies, and an imperial academy of descriptive poets. The supreme charm of Mr. Arnold's work is a sense of right resulting in a spontaneous temperance which bears no mark of curb or snaffle, but obeys the hand with imperceptible submission and gracious reserve. Other and older poets are to the full as vivid, as incisive and impressive; others have a more pungent colour, a more trenchant outline; others as deep knowledge and as fervid enjoyment of natural things. But no one has in like measure that tender and final quality of touch which tempers the excessive light and suffuses the refluent shade; which as it were washes with soft air the sides of the earth, steeps with dew of quiet and dyes with colours of repose the ambient ardour of noon, the fiery affluence of evening. His verse bathes us with fresh radiance and light rain, when weary of the violence of summer and

winter in which others dazzle and detain us; his spring wears here and there a golden waif of autumn, his autumn a rosy stray of spring. His tones and effects are pure, lucid, aërial; he knows by some fine impulse of temperance all rules of distance, of reference, of proportion; nothing is thrust or pressed upon our eyes, driven or beaten into our ears. For the instinctive selection of simple and effectual detail he is unmatched among English poets of the time, unless by Mr. Morris, whose landscape has much of the same quality, as clear, as noble, and as memorable-memorable for this especially, that you are not vexed or fretted by mere brilliance of point and sharpness of stroke, and such intemperate excellence as gives astonishment the precedence of admiration such beauties as strike you and startle and

Of these it is superfluous to cite instances from the ablest of our countrymen's works; they are taught and teach that the most remote, the most elaborate, the most intricate and ingenious fashions of allusion and detail make up the best poetical style; they fill their verse with sharp-edged prettinesses, with shining surprises and striking accidents that are anything but casual; upon every limb and feature you see marks of the chisel and the plane there is a conscious complacency of polish which seems to rebuke emulation and challenge improvement. It is otherwise with the two we have named ; they are not pruned and pared into excellence, they have not so much of pungency and point; but they have breadth and ease and purity, they have largeness and sureness of eyesight; they know what to give and to withhold, what to express and to suppress. Above all, they have