Page:Essays and Studies

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MATTHEW ARNOLD'S NEW POEMS.

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because he cannot live without it. Mr. Arnold would set them as stars in heaven, lucida sidera; their little lights will hardly burn the night out, but meantime they shine well enough for children to watch them twinkle and "wonder what they are." Without a glimpse of genius, without more light or strength of spirit than many others unknown, Mlle. de Guérin shows always a beautiful and admirable soul; her diary and her letters have more than usual of the lovely and loving qualities of good women, true sisters and gentle wives, faithful and fervent and worthy to receive again the lavish love they give; they never would come forward, they need never be thrust forward, as genius or as saint. The immortal women in either kind—St. Theresa, St. Catherine, Vittoria Colonna, Mrs. Browning, Miss Christina Rossetti—belong to a different world and scheme of things. With one verse or one word of theirs any one of these could have absorbed and consumed her as a sunbeam of the fiery heaven a dewdrop of the dawning earth.! Nor, to repass for an instant from the personal to the religious question started from this cover by Mr. Arnold, is it just or rational to oppose to her delicate provincial piety the coarsest and ugliest form of

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↑ If you would see the note of distinction between religious genius and religious talent, compare with any of Mile. de Guérin's idyllic effusions of gracious piety, fresh and sweet in their small way as the dusk and the dew, the great new-year hymn of Miss Rossetti,
⁠"Passing away, saith the world, passing away,"
so much the noblest of sacred poems in our language that there is none which comes near it enough to stand second; a hymn touched as with the fire and bathed as in the light of sunbeams, tuned as to chords and cadences of refluent sea-music beyond reach of harp and organ, large echoes of the serene and sonorous tides of heaven.

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[1] If you would see the note of distinction between religious genius and religious talent, compare with any of Mile. de Guérin's idyllic effusions of gracious piety, fresh and sweet in their small way as the dusk and the dew, the great new-year hymn of Miss Rossetti,
⁠"Passing away, saith the world, passing away,"
so much the noblest of sacred poems in our language that there is none which comes near it enough to stand second; a hymn touched as with the fire and bathed as in the light of sunbeams, tuned as to chords and cadences of refluent sea-music beyond reach of harp and organ, large echoes of the serene and sonorous tides of heaven.

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