in and were broken by the strife. Ah, he thinks at the close, with that constantly recurring thought of his in which so much of his inner life and of ours is hidden, let the new world thunder on its noisy triumph and use its powers, be proud of its turbulent life or of its eternal trifling-yet there are a few who would in quiet take their bent towards unwearied pursuit of the perfect, who like Glanvil have "one aim, one business, one desire," who wait in joyous unconcern for the celestial light; and they, in these unthinking days, are the refuge and light of the world.

Then the two poems to Senancour, the writer of Obermann, mingle their personal and self-revealing verse with so wide a human interest that in all who read them a hundred questions rise of their own soul, of the age in which they live, and of the fates of man. On the great difference of the second from the first I have already written, but I may dwell here on their charm-charm of grave thought, ranging far and wide, charm of happy word and phrase, and charm of natural description. The very atmosphere of that lovely land, where so many hearts have been healed, the flowerhaunted meadows, the shimmering lake below, the blue hills, the far-off snows-is in the loving verse, and it is mingled with the soul of Arnold and Obermann, till each mountain slope and every flower upon them, and the waves of the lake as they break on the shore, are of men, and through men, and in men.

Of all these elegies, the Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis

are the most delightful, delightful even though their subject be sad. I have dwelt on the tenderness of their sadness. I have not dwelt on their contemplative beauty. They are pervaded by that retired contemplation of life a man may have who, flying from the storm of cities for a brief holiday, thinks the brief time into an eternity, and in the eternal hermitage of his soul muses on earth and human life.

These poems reach excellence, that rare thing Arnold himself loves so much, to whose lonely summit, the artist, climbing through rocks and mist, so seldom can attain. They are pure poetry, moving in a dance, serious and bright, graceful and grave in turn, to the Dorian pipe, "the Dorian strain." The soft recorders accompany the pastoral, the idyllic song, wise with thought, happy with noble phrase, filled with accurate and loving description of nature; and in it lives from line to line the contemplation of humanity.

Virgil and Theocritus have been infused into their manner and their verse, nor has Lycidas been quite forgotten. Yet they are not imitative; the atmosphere, the thought, the music, and the subject are Arnold's own. Although this classic echo is heard in them, they are modern, of the tempestuous age when they were written by one who, while he wrote them, looked on the tempest, but for their meditative hour was not tossed upon its waves. Some of the classic episodes seem a little out of place, especially that of the Tyrian trader and the Grecian coaster at the end of the Scholar

Emit

Gipsy, but we are glad to forgive this for the sake of their charm. Indeed, whenever Arnold's poetry touches Greece, we meet an especial music and grace; but nowhere is this clear, lovely, and sweet air so lucid and so pure as in the classic scenery and life which glide in and out of these two elegies. Oxford, while we read, seems not far away from the flowers of Enna or the silent stream of Mantua, nor is the wandering student then surprised to hear Theocritus piping near the Iffley mill, or see, as he passes by, Virgil dreaming under the shade of the Fyfield tree.

But Glanvil's scholar, the gipsy-hearted wanderer, a shy shade that comes and goes, who loves the lovely, quiet world, pursuing ever the ineffable, is brought, in a beautiful variety, into contrast with Arnold's own life, and with the feverish life of his time. Beyond the elegiac cry is the greater cry of humanity. Thyrsis, too, closes with the same personal, ever-recurring strain. Thyrsis loved the country, so did I. He felt the storm of his world and went to meet it. It was too much for him and he died.

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?

But I was forced into the world. The way is long and the Alps of truth unclimbable. I too am going; but I wander on, like the shy Scholar, like Thyrsis, on the quest. The light we sought is shining still.

IN

outline.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

N the course of the history of all the arts, and perhaps most plainly in the history of poetry, similar conditions recur, not in particulars, but in general The different circumstances of each age naturally modify the conditions away from accurate similarity, but in the main development of the art, a time comes when it follows lines resembling those it has previously followed, and this analogous condition has been produced by similar causes. I have already in other places noticed such a similarity between the creation of a literary poetry-to use an inadequate term-by Keats, and that of a similar kind of poetry by Rossetti and Morris. Both poetries have little to do with the age in which they were written. They reject, on the whole, the present and abide in the past. Their subjects are not the subjects of their day, nor are they influenced to any great extent by the thoughts or emotions of the world around them. Their main desire is to live outside of that world, to assimilate a different realm of thought and feeling, to find beauty as she was in the past not as she seems to be in the present, to live in the imagined not in the actual world; and yet to keep the imagined world true to the main lines of

nature and human nature. "Let us escape," they cry, "into a lovelier earth, a purer air, a simpler and more natural life."

We can trace, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the beginnings of such a cry in Arnold's passing endeavour to find his subjects in Greek, Norse, and mediæval story, in his reiterated longing for beauty and calm, apart from the noise of warring thought and low desires. We have looked back to the time when in the fifties and sixties of the last century the old faiths and theories of life were thrown into the hissing furnace of scientific and historical criticism, and no one knew what would emerge when the amalgam had cooled. "We have seen how this confused world, and the tossed world of his own heart, were too much for Arnold. He could not escape from the trouble when he was young. He never quite escaped from it. But Rossetti did, and so did Morris.

The history of their poetry repeats the history of the poetry of Keats. It had no connexion with the thoughts concerning man and the war around them which so deeply influenced poetry from Blake to Shelley. The ideas Shelley sought to revive, those also which Byron drove at the heads of men, made the slightest possible impression on Keats. He does not, on the whole, seem to be aware of their existence. The controversies, furies, and passions which had collected round them in the realms of social, political, and religious thought, and which had lashed Byron and Shelley into poetic