our school as upon one wholly void of spiritual or imaginative culture, he speaks of his poems as known to no large circle—implies this at least, if I remember: he will not care to be assured that to some boys at Eton Sohrab and Rustum, Tristram and Iseult, have been close and common friends, their stream of Oxus and bays of Brittany familiar almost as the well-loved Thames weirs and reaches. However, of this poem of "Empedocles" the world it seems was untimely robbed, though I remember on searching to have found a notice of it here and there. Certain fragments were then given back by way of dole, chiefly in the second series of the author's revised poems. But one, the largest if not the brightest jewel, was withheld; the one long and lofty chant of Empedocles. The reasons assigned by Mr. Arnold in a former preface for cancelling the complete poem had some weight: the subject-matter is oppressive, the scheme naked and monotonous; the blank verse is not sonorous, not vital and various enough; in spite of some noble interludes, it fails on the whole to do the work and carry the weight wanted; its simplicity is stony and grey, with dry flats and rough whinstones. To the lyrics which serve as water-springs and pastures I shall have to pay tribute of thanks in their turn; but first I would say something of that strain of choral philosophy which falls here "as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." It is a model of grave, clear, solemn verse; the style plain and bare, but sufficient and strong; the thought deep, lucid, direct. We may say of it what the author has himself said of the wise and sublime—verses of Epictetus, that "the fortitude of that is for the strong, for the few; even for them, the spiritual atmo-