THE HOUSEHOLDER. (Epilogue to Fifine at the Fair.) I. Savage I was sitting in my house, late, lone: When, in a moment, just a knock, call, cry, 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, Till, 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! All the neighbour-talk with man and maid - such men! All the fuss and trouble of street-sounds, window-sights: All the worry of flapping door and echoing roof; and then All the fancies . . . Who were they had leave, dared try Darker arts that almost struck despair in me? If you knew but how I dwelt down here!' quoth I: And was I so better off up there?' quoth She. 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 al and Death is nought!' quoth She. (1872.) EPILOGUE TO ASOLANDO. At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, When you set your fancies free, Will they pass to where by death, foo's think, imprisoned— Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so, -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 selections 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 judgments which he would have felt and expressed in just the same way twenty years later. From the beginning, in verse as in his intimate prose, Arnold gave evidence of a singularly clear, open mind, "playing freely " upon all the aspects and all the problems of life as they presented themselves to him in turn. That was his natural endowment; but from the beginning, also, he set himself to enrich it by the persistent study of "the best that is known and thought in the world," as taught by the great writers of all times. Among these writers, the Greeks came first, and their influence penetrated deepest. Quite early in his poetical history he wrote. his memorable sonnet To a Friend,' in answer to his question, 'Who prop, in these bad days, my mind?"; and the answer that he gave was to name two Greek poets and a Greek moralist, Homer, Sophocles, Epictetus. Companions of his youth, these influences remained with him to the end. One of the most surprising qualities of Arnold's mind was his power, in spite of the complexity of his own culture-in spite of the Hebraistic elements in it, and of the cross-influences of his multifarious reading-his power of assimilating the Greek spirit in its simplicity, and of presenting ideas, characters, images, with the clearness of Phidian sculpture or of Sophoclean verse. None was more conscious than he of that disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims '--but none was less personally infected by it. Lucidity, the subject of one of the latest and most brilliant of his public addresses, was his characteristic from the first; a 'sad lucidity' perhaps, if we are to trust the bulk of his poems, but one that was never clouded by confusion. This critic clearness' was doubtless a gift of nature to him, but it was developed by a study of Greek literature which, with him, did not end when he left the University. Why, especially after the great success of his Oxford lecture on Theocritus (Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment')-why he never carried out his scheme of a volume on the Greek poets, his friends never quite understood. He was not, indeed, a professed scholar, in the school and college sense of the word, but no writer of his day could have written so adequately of the |