peratively necessary for the believer in the creed of Science who was likewise a believer in the creed of the Churches. The consideration of the revelations made by Science filled him at times with misgiving for the revelations of his religion.

Browning's was quite another intellectual temper. He hastened joyfully to embrace truths new and old. There was little need to harmonise new with old; they could not fail to be in harmony if both were indeed truths. One was as precious as the other, and whether their meeting-place was within human sight or not was a matter of little moment.

'On the earth the broken arcs, in the heaven the perfect round.'

Matthew Arnold is by contrast the representative poet of the later culture, where that culture parts company with the old beliefs, feels compelled to do so, and bids them a tearful farewell.

If a critic happens to share the opinions to which Tennyson found it possible to remain faithful, he will be apt to think of Arnold's poetical work as the expression of a philosophical creed, and as such to speak of its spiritual weakness. On the other hand, a critic who belongs to Arnold's own school of thought, in matters of religion and art, will incline to dwell almost exclusively upon the technical excellence of his art, the beauty of

its severely classic simplicity, the delicacy and purity of its colour, the instinctive grace of its rhythmic movement, its happy fidelity in rendering English landscape. As typical of these two classes of critics, let us take Mr. Hutton and Mr. Swinburne. It is interesting to notice that Mr. Hutton and Mr. Swinburne both express regret-but for very different reasons-that Arnold's poetry should so constantly sound the note of dubiety regarding things spiritual as they are represented in the creed of Christendom. Mr. Hutton, observing, as he could not easily fail to observe, the air of sadness and disquiet betrayed by the poet in poems dealing with the loss the soul has sustained in the removal of its chief support and consolation, finds in these poems (using the words of Hazlitt) 'the sweetness, the gravity, the strength, the beauty, and the languor of death.' Mr. Swinburne, too, regrets that Arnold should so frequently have given utterance to the pain of uncertainty in spiritual things. "This alone I find profitless and painful in his work, this occasional habit of harking back and loitering in mind among the sepulchres.' The highest significance of Matthew Arnold's poetry for Mr. Hutton lies in its confession of an unsatisfiable spiritual hunger; its highest significance for Mr. Swinburne lies in its classic excellence as an art-product. And everywhere is the one ruling

and royal quality of classic work, an assured and equal excellence of touch.' An impartial critic will prefer to avoid the separation made here, the separation of the two aspects that this, in common with all poetry, presents the interest of the subject-matter, and the interest of the form. He will be desirous of considering it without unduly untwisting the composing strands—without either (on the one hand) too loudly lamenting its weakness as a moral or spiritual force, or (on the other hand) neglecting the nerve of motive and the nerve of thought which are its real distinction. And he will specially wish to avoid the latter error, because it is one to which modern criticism is prone, and because in the best poetry, in the poetry of Sophocles, of Dante, of Shakespeare, the form is not the chief care of the poet, but the thought that moulds the form, the something that is beyond the reach of the artist, who is merely a finished workman in technique.

For this reason not Sohrab and Rustem, not Balder Dead, nor any of the poems in the classical manner of which Arnold was the advocate, seem to me to possess the same interest-certainly not the same significance-as the lyrics and elegiacs into which ran the stream of his own inner life. He was a poetic artist who studied in the classical school and with consummate success; but if we

wish to find the man in the poetry, it is not to these studies from the antique that we shall turn. And one might go further and say that it is when most himself and least a student of the Greek that even in these poems he takes us captive.

'But the majestic river floated on,

Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved,
Rejoicing through the hushed Chorasmian waste,
Under the solitary moon :—he flowed
Right for the polar star, past Orgunjè,
Brimming and bright and large: then sands begin
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcelled Oxus strains along
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles—
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,
A foiled circuitous wanderer-till at last

The longed-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright

And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.'

Is there not suggested here a pathos other than that declared? It is not Oxus only that is a 'foiled circuitous wanderer'; it is not for Oxus alone that there waits the quiet of a home of waters,' tranquil, infinite. Who will fail to recognise the prevailing mood of the poet who held that the secret of life was peace, not joy?

The biography of Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, im

presses itself upon the reader not only as the liferecord of a scholar and noble gentleman but also of a thinker, before whose clearness of vision and steadiness of aim the intellectual difficulties of his time seemed to vanish away. England has possessed among her family of brilliant sons during the present century many of more commanding genius and more splendid gifts; perhaps none whose intellectual sanity more nearly approached the ideal, or whose serene cheerfulness was SO admirable. Upon his mind the pressure of problems which disturbed his contemporaries seemed to have no bewildering effect, for, as he himself said, in presence of an insoluble difficulty his mind reposed as tranquilly as in possession of a demonstrated truth. His moral life was at no hour troubled by the suspicion that the struggle cannot avail us, that there is some incurable disease which baffles, and will ever continue to baffle, the most cunning physicians: a germ of evil, the source of all irremediable disorders in the universe as it exists. Or if, indeed, the spectres of the mind did trouble him, they had no power over his spirit to sap its enthusiasm.

'If, in the paths of the world,

Stones might have wounded thy feet,

Toil or dejection have tried

Thy spirit, of that we saw