Page:Essays and Studies

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MATTHEW ARNOLD'S NEW POEMS.

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life that is not after mortal law—the childlike moan after lost love mingling with the pure outer note of a song not human—the look in it as of bright bewildered eyes with tears not theirs and alien wonder in the watch of then— the tender, marvellous, simple beauty of the poem, its charm as of a sound or a flower of the sea—set it and save it apart from all others in a niche of the memory. This has all the inexplicable inevitable sweetness of a child's or a bird's in its note; "Thyrsis" has all the accomplished and adult beauty of a male poem. In the volume which it crowns there is certainly no new jewel of equal water. "Palladium" is a fresh sample of the noble purity and clearness which we find always and always praise in his reflective poetry; its cool aërial colour like that of a quiet sky between full sunset and full moonrise, made ready for the muster of the stars, swept clean of cloud and flame, and laved with limpid unruffled air from western green to eastern grey; a sky the cenotaph of unburied sunlight, the mould of moonlight unborn. "A Southern Night" is steeped in later air, as gentle and more shining; the stanzas on the Grande Chartreuse are stamped with the impression of a solemn charm, and so the new verses on Obermann,^[1] the new verses on Marguerite, strange to read

↑ Among these the stanzas on the advent of Christianity, of "the Mother with the Child," and their enduring life while only faith in them endured, recall the like passage, more thoughtful and fruitful still, in that wise and noble poem, Mr, W. B. Scott's "Year of the World"; a poem to whose great qualities and affluent beauties of letter and of spirit the requisite and certain justice of time remains hitherto a debt unpaid. Its author must divide with Mr. Arnold the palm of intellectual or philosophic poetry, the highest achieved in England since Wordsworth, and in many things of moment higher than his.

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[1] Among these the stanzas on the advent of Christianity, of "the Mother with the Child," and their enduring life while only faith in them endured, recall the like passage, more thoughtful and fruitful still, in that wise and noble poem, Mr, W. B. Scott's "Year of the World"; a poem to whose great qualities and affluent beauties of letter and of spirit the requisite and certain justice of time remains hitherto a debt unpaid. Its author must divide with Mr. Arnold the palm of intellectual or philosophic poetry, the highest achieved in England since Wordsworth, and in many things of moment higher than his.

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