THE RING AND THE BOOK. (Dedication.) O lyric love, half angel and half bird Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart When the first summons from the darkling earth Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, And bared them of the glory--to drop down, To toil for man, to suffer or to die, This is the same voice: can thy soul know change? -Never conclude, but raising hand and head In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home, (1868.) THE HOUSEHOLDER. (Epilogue to Fifine at the Fair.) I. Savage I was sitting in my house, late, lone: Half a pang and all a rapture, there again were we! 'What, and is it really you again?' quoth I: 'I again, what else did you expect?' quoth She. II. 'Never mind, hie away from this old house— Every crumbling brick embrowned with sin and shame! Quick, in its corners ere certain shapes arouse ! Let them every devil of the night-lay claim, Make and mend, or rap and rend, for me! Goodbye! God be their guard from disturbance at their glee, Til, crash, down comes the carcass in a heap!' quoth I: 'Nay, but there's a decency required!' quoth She. III. 'Ah, but if you knew how time has dragged, days, nights! IV. 'Help and get it over! Reunited to his wife (How draw up the paper lets the parish-people know?) Lies M., or N., departed from this life, Day the this or that, month and year the so and so. What i' the way of final flourish? Prose, verse? Try! Affliction sore long time he bore, or, what is it to be? Till God did please to grant him ease. Do end!' quoth I: 'I end with-Love is all and Death is nought!' quoth She. (1872) EPILOGUE TO ASOLANDO. At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, Will they pass to where-by death, fools think, imprisoned- -Pity me? Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly. -Being-who? One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake. No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time Greet the unseen with a cheer! Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 'Strive and thrive!' cry 'Speed,-fight on, fare ever There as here!' (1889.) MATTHEW ARNOLD. [ELDEST son of Dr. Arnold, of Rugby; born Dec. 24, 1822, at Laleham, near Staines; educated at Winchester, Rugby, and Balliol College, Oxford. Won the Newdigate Prize, 1843, with a poem on 'Cromwell.' Published The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems. By A., 1849; Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems (same signature), 1852; Poems, First Series, 1853; Poems, Second Series, 1855. Elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, 1857; re-elected, 1862 till 1867. It was as professorial lectures that his chief critical essays were first given to the world. He published Merope, a Tragedy, 1858; New Poems, 1867; and issued his collected poems in 1877, 1881, and 1885. His numerous prose writings were published between 1853 and 1888. He died suddenly, at Liverpool, on April 15, 1888.] It is with a sad appropriateness that we include in the 'definitive' edition of The English Poets the poems of the eminent writer to whom we owe the General Introduction to the volumes. The fourteen years which have elapsed since their first publication have brought to a close the life of many a great Englishman, and to the poets they have been especially fatal. Rossetti went first, then Arnold, then his seniors, Browning and Tennyson. Sharing as Arnold did the greatness of the last two, there is a first and great distinction to be noticed between them and him. They were poets by profession, so to speak; they lived for poetry, and went on producing it regularly till the end of their long lives. He, on the other hand, was a busy public official, and from the year 1851 till his retirement from the Education Department in 1885, all the time that he could give to literature was saved from an exhausting daily round of work. Again, his literary vocation was not all poetical, as theirs was. It was as a critic that he was, in his life-time, most widely known, and that he had the most immediate effect upon his generation. But if the stream of his verse is scanty; if his three volumes look slight beside the sixteen volumes of Browning; if, during a wide space of his middle life he almost ceased to write poetry on the other hand, how little there is that one could wish away! A certain largeness of production is undoubtedly necessary before one can admit the claim of an artist to the highest place; but at the same time, excess of production is a commoner fault with poets than its contrary is. Instances of an over-chastened Muse like Gray's, or in a less degree, like Arnold's, are comparatively rare among true poets. While of Dryden, of Wordsworth, of Byron, more than half might well be spared, there is scarcely anything in Arnold's volumes-except perhaps Balder Dead-that has not a distinct value of its own, scarcely anything that ought not to be preserved. Of no poet is it more difficult to make a satisfying selection; and we may echo in serious earnest the answer that he used laughingly to make to the friends who complained that this or that favourite was excluded from the poems chosen by him for the Golden Treasury volume-‘If I had had my own way I should have included everything!' Matthew Arnold's writings, in poetry and in prose, are their own commentary; at least, even those who knew him best can say little about their genesis or their sources beyond what they themselves convey. No man of letters was ever more genial, or more affectionate to his friends, and yet none ever told less, even in intimate private letters, about his literary work or about those inmost thoughts of his which from time to time found expression in poetry. As a rule, he composed' in his head,' like Wordsworth, and wrote down his verse on any scraps of paper that came handy; whereas his prose was always written methodically, in the early morning hours. He had the habit, almost the passion, of destroying whatever manuscripts had served their purpose; and at his death scarcely any scraps of his writings were found, and scarcely any of the multitudes of letters that he had received. Yet his letters to his family and friends remain, of course; and it is to be hoped that before long we shall have Mr. George Russell's selection from them. This, though it will contain but few actual references to the poems, will naturally throw light upon them, and will show, as they do, how early his mind reached its maturity. The first little volume of poems, it will be remembered, was published in 1849, when Arnold was twenty-seven; but five or six years before that he had written letters containing judgements which |