in the contemplation of a blessed far-off consummation towards which the whole creation moves. Arnold felt that these consolations and remedies were breathed from the dispassionate calm, the orderly perfection and loveliness of Nature, that they entered and for a little time gave ease to the heart from the contemplation of the highest reaches of human art, and that they were abundantly present in the deliverance of his own soul in his poetry. Various has been the teaching of the prophets of the century: Carlyle's, a fire-eyed defiance of the 'Everlasting No,' and a devotion to the work nearest one's hand; George Eliot's, a determined bracing of the moral sinews though without hope or joy; Arnold's, that consolation may be derived from Nature, from beauty, and from art. And the subjects of his own poetry are thus determined. They are such as in poetic treatment will best relieve his own overstrained feelings, such as will ease his wound's imperious anguish.' Thus it comes that, take what form they may, his poems are transcripts of his own emotional moods. Throughout his poetry to recall his own fine phrase spoken of Byron, he bears the pageant of his bleeding heart.'

To escape from the enfeebling mood, he turns to Nature. Take this from Empedocles on Etna, when he passes from critical efforts to appraise and weigh the value and the issues of existence, to bathe

his spirit in divine light and air, in the wells of sovereign and unceasing beauty :—

'Far, far from here,

The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay

Among the green Illyrian hills; and there
The sunshine in the happy glens is fair,
And by the sea, and in the brakes

The grass is cool, the sea-side air

Buoyant and fresh, the mountain flowers
More sweet and virginal than ours.'

Of the class of poems in which he turns to Nature
for consolation, Thyrsis will serve as the best
example. Here the elegiac strain softly dies away
into the tender sweetness of the soothing music
that celebrates some morn in early June before the
roses and the longest day; or the high midsummer
pomps,
the roses that shine afar down the alleys, the
lattices jasmine-muffled :-

So, some tempestuous morn in early June,
When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er,
Before the roses and the longest day-
When garden-walks and all the grassy floor
With blossoms red and white of fallen May
And chestnut flowers are strewn-

So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry
From the wet field, through the vext garden-trees
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze :
The bloom is gone and with the bloom go I.

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?
Soon will the high midsummer pomps come on,
Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,

Sweet William with his homely cottage smell,
And stocks in fragrant blow.

Roses that down the valleys shine afar,

And open jasmine-muffled lattices,

And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,
And the full moon, and the white evening star.'

Arnold's gospel according to Nature is not Wordsworth's. While both poets are lovers of Nature, and join in her matins and vespers, her litanies, her festivals of spring and summer, they worship her each in a different spirit. In no poem of Arnold's is to be heard the pure note of joy; he is the poet of a nation's elegiac mood. The consolations of Nature that are to him so soothing, so indispensable, are the whispers of her peace, the hushing effluence of her calm; while to Wordsworth Nature is the source of rapture, of passionate delight, of inexpressible thrills of joyous ecstasy. To Arnold she is the consoling mother whose gracious countenance and winning sympathy soothes, steals away the sharpness of his pain. To Wordsworth she is much more than this: his teacher, his constant companion, sharer and source of joy as well as friend. In the one case we have palliative remedies for the fever of the mind; in the other a power of renovation and a stimulus, assistance in health as well as in disease. Wordsworth's healing power arises from this, that, like Shakespeare, he discovers a joy in widest commonalty spread,' and (what is

still harder to find) 'joys that spring out of human suffering. To become a Wordsworthian, one must be born again; to read the poetry of Arnold with pleasure, we need not again become children. It will soothe us in unrest for a time; while if we learn the secret of the elder poet, we shall enter into possession of a peace that cannot be disturbed.

Of Arnold himself what shall we say as last word? How better or more truly can we think of him than as he himself taught us to think of the high-hearted Roman Emperor with whose inner life of thought and feeling he had so much in common?

We see him just, wise, self-governed, tender, thankful, blameless; yet with all this, agitated, stretching out his arms for something beyond

Tendentemque manus ripae ulterioris amore.'

THE POETRY OF GEORGE MEREDITH

WHAT distinguishes Mr. Meredith among living writers is not so much his possession of this or that quality, the intensity and variety of his sympathies, the power or peculiarity of his style: it is that in an era of talent, in an era in which we may be said to suffer from a plethora of talent, his work is so unmistakably beyond the reach of talent, so far, too, beyond the reach of labour added to ambition and desire-it is so obviously the work of genius. Readers of Mr. Meredith's novels long ago discovered in him the man with the key to a new garden of romance, which matched the best-loved of old, to a new gallery in art, whose portraits might hang unabashed beside those of the old masters. From a little clan the readers of his prose have grown into an army; but as for the readers of his verse, these may even now easily be numbered. Yet it is not beyond possibility-though the Meredith of today is indisputably the novelist-that the Meredith of the twentieth century may be the poet. All novels in every language,' said De Quincey, are