And red with his life-blood the earth was dyed,
The earth they laid him in.

The sun looked down on him there and spake :
'I am content.'

And flowers bloomed thickly upon his grave,
And were glad they blossomed there.

And when the wind in the tree-tops roared,
The soldier asked from the deep, dark grave:
'Did the banner flutter then?'

'Not so, my hero,' the wind replied,
The fight is done, but the banner won,
Thy comrades of old have borne it hence,
Have borne it in triumph hence.'

Then the soldier spake from the deep, dark grave: 'I am content.'

And again he heard the shepherds pass

And the flocks go wand'ring by,

And the soldier asked: Is the sound I hear
The sound of the battle's roar?'

And they all replied: My hero, nay !
Thou art dead and the fight is o'er,

Our country joyful and free.'

Then the soldier spake from the deep, dark grave: 'I am content.'

Then he heareth the lovers, laughing, pass,

And the soldier asks once more:

'Are these not the voices of them that love,

That love - and remember me?'

'Not so, my hero,' the lovers say,

'We are those that remember not;

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For the spring has come and the earth has smiled,
And the dead must be forgot.'

Then the soldier spake from the deep, dark grave:
'I am content.'

The water has brought it me back no more."

In such poems as these we have reflected the common source far up among the hills of primitive human experience, whence both the two opposing streams of pessimism and optimism proceed. The grass must wither; the flower must fade; the soldier must die and be forgotten. That is the raw material of pessimism. Yet even the hay and the wilted flowers, clothed as they are here in human attributes, manifest the power to care lovingly for what will come after them; the soldier in the deep, dark grave is content in the gladness of a life he has helped to make possible, but in which he cannot individually share. That is the root of all brave optimism; the pledge of a noble immortality. Yet here on the simple page of the peasant-poet they lie unreconciled.

A more reflective age cannot leave these two elements the unsatisfied individual desires, and the devotion to universal ends - side by side in this simple, unreflecting fashion. The modern poet cannot be satisfied to call the game a draw. He must make one or the other of the two principles supreme. The pessimist seizes the unsatisfied desire; emphasizes that element until it stands for the whole, or the chief feature of human experience. That, of course, is the trick which

Schopenhauer knows how to play upon us so cleverly. He tells us: "We feel pain, but not painlessness. feel the wish as we feel hunger and thirst; but as soon as it has been fulfilled it is like the mouthful that has been swallowed; for only pain and want can be felt positively, and therefore announce themselves; wellbeing, on the other hand, is merely negative. Happiness always lies in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud which the wind drives over the sunny plain: before and behind it all is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. The present is therefore always insufficient; but the future is uncertain, and the past is irrevocable."

Matthew Arnold in English literature is the great highpriest of this pessimistic creed. He is artful above all others to seize the melancholy aspect of human experience, as of moonlight on Mount Auburn tombstones, and make that represent the whole. As a connecting link between the naïve simplicity of the peasant-poet and the ringing optimism of Browning, we must have a few lines from this bewitching pessimist. The shortest and in some respects the best poem of this mood is

66 DOVER BEACH.

"The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd sand,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles, which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

"Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

"The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

"Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night."

In " Empedocles," to quote merely a few scattered lines, we are told:

"Thou hast no right to bliss,

No title from the gods to welfare and repose."

"But we are all the same the fools of our own woes."

"In vain our pent wills fret,

And would the world subdue.
Limits we did not set,

Condition all we do."

"To tunes we did not call our being must keep chime."

"The world is what it is, for all our dust and din.”

"The ill deeds of other men make often our life dark."

Again in "A Summer Night" —

"For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun's hot eye,

With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning task work give,
Dreaming of nought beyond their prison wall.
And as, year after year,

Fresh products of their barren labor fall

From their tired hands, and rest

Never yet comes more near,

Gloom settles down slowly over their breast.

And while they try to stem

The waves of mournful thought by which they are

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Death in their prison reaches them,

Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest."