Nor less, high-stationed on the grey grave heights,
High-thoughted seers with heaven's heart-kindling lights
Hold converse: and the herd of meaner things

Knows or by fiery scourge or fiery shaft

When wrath on thy broad brows has risen, and laughed, Darkening thy soul with shadow of thunderous wings.

Now the flowers curl round and close their cells.

Baby, flower of light,
Sleep and see
Brighter dreams than we,

Till good day shall smile away good night.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

MATTHEW ARNOLD, the apostle of "sweetness and light," was a man with a message to the cultured only. He had little sympathy with the uncultured, with the uneducated, who still form by far the greater portion of mankind. He was a poet, critic, essayist for scholars, for literary men, for the refined; a thoroughly literary writer who had acquired an ex

quisite style, but who was more sensitive to influences than fertile in original impulse. He has uttered some exquisite notes for cultured ears to catch, but he will always be caviare to the general public.

Matthew Arnold was the son of Dr. Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby, and was born at Laleham in 1822. He was educated at Winchester, Rugby and Oxford, and was elected to a fellowship in Oriel College in 1845. In 1851 he was appointed Lay-Inspector of Schools, which position he retained until shortly before his death. He traveled frequently in France and Germany, and made elaborate reports on foreign systems of education. In 1857 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In 1849 his first volume of verse, "The Strayed Reveller," was published; and in 1853 "Empedocles and other Poems" appeared. In 1859 he published "Merope," a tragedy after the antique, and the year following a volume entitled "New Poems." Subsequently he published but little poetry, but devoted himself principally to critical essays. His poems are mainly one long variation on a single theme, the divorce between the soul and the intellect, and the depths of spiritual regret and yearning which that divorce produces.

In 1865 his "Essays on Criticism" were published, and at once gave him indisputable rank as a writer of English prose. The volume had an almost immediate influence upon students of literature in England. Soon afterwards he began a series of prose works in a sort of middle region between

literature, politics and ethics. The best known of them are "Culture and Anarchy," "St. Paul and Protestantism," "Literature and Dogma," and "Last Essays on Church and Religion." Not able to rest content with earlier dogma and inspiration, yet shrinking from an unsympathetic rationalism, he wanders, as he puts it, "between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born." Later Arnold returned to more purely literary criticism, though diverging from it somewhat in his "Mixed Essays" and "Irish Essays," among the last works that he published. He died suddenly in 1888.

The keynote of Matthew Arnold's work is a yearning for sweetness and light, for calm peace and beauty in a restless world that to him is out of joint. Unfortunately he deemed himself born with a mission to set it right. His hope for the future is that sweetness and light will grow, and that the authority of what he styled the remnant or elect, i. e., people who accepted his dicta, would come to be finally established.

BALDER DEAD.

(For the death of Balder, the Norse Apollo, as told in the Scandinavian mythology, see Volume II., p. 369.)

So on the floor lay Balder dead; and round
Lay thickly strewn swords, axes, darts and spears,
Which all the Gods in sport had idly thrown
At Balder, whom no weapon pierced or clove:
But in his breast stood fixed the fatal bough
Of mistletoe, which Lok the Accuser gave
To Hoder, and unwitting Hoder threw :
'Gainst that alone had Balder's life no charm.
And all the Gods and all the Heroes came
And stood round Balder on the bloody floor,
Weeping and wailing; and Valhalla rang
Up to its golden roof with sobs and cries:
And on the tables stood the untasted meats,

And in the horns and gold-rimmed skulls the wine:
And now would Night have fallen, and found them yet

Wailing; but otherwise was Odin's will:

And thus the Father of the Ages spake:

"Enough of tears, ye Gods, enough of wail!

Not to lament in was Valhalla made.

If any here might weep for Balder's death
I most might weep, his Father; such a son
I lose to-day, so bright, so loved a God.
But he has met that doom which long ago
The Nornies, when his mother bare him, spun,
And Fate set seal, that so his end must be.
Balder has met his death, and ye survive:
Weep him an hour; but what can grief avail?
For you yourselves, ye Gods, shall meet your doom,
All ye who hear me, and inhabit Heaven,

And I too, Odin too, the Lord of all;

But ours we shall not meet, when that day comes,
With woman's tears and weak, complaining cries-
Why should we meet another's portion so?
Rather it fits you, having wept your hour,

With cold, dry eyes, and hearts composed and stern,
To live, as erst your daily life in Heaven:
By me shall vengeance on the murderer Lok,
The Foe, the Accuser, whom, though Gods, we hate,
Be strictly cared for, in the appointed day.
Meanwhile to-morrow, when the morning dawns,
Bring wood to the sea-shore, to Balder's ship,
And on the deck build high a funeral pile,
And on the top lay Balder's corpse, and put
Fire to the wood, and send him out to sea
To burn; for that is what the dead desire."

So having spoken, the King of Gods arose

And mounted his horse Sleipner, whom he rode,
And from the hall of Heaven he rode away

To Lidskialf, and sate upon his throne,

The Mount, from whence his eye surveys the world.

THE REMNANT IN AMERICA.

(From "Discourses in America.")

IN these United States you are fifty millions and more. I suppose that, as in England, as in France, as everywhere else, so likewise here, the majority of the people doubt very much whether the majority is unsound; or, rather, they have no doubt at all about the matter-they are sure that it is not unsound. But let us consent to-night to remain to the end

in the ideas of the sages and prophets whom we have been following all along, and let us suppose that in the present actual stage of the world, as in all the stages through which the world has passed hitherto, the majority be, in general, unsound everywhere. Where is the failure? I suppose that in a democratic community like this-with its newness, its magnitude, its strength, its life of business, its sheer freedom and equality-the danger is in the absence of the discipline of respect; in hardness and materialism, exaggeration and boastfulness; in a false smartness, a false audacity, a want of soul and delicacy. "Whatsoever things are elevated"— Whatsoever things are noble, serious, have true elevationthat, perhaps, in our mind is the maxim which points to where the failure of the unsound majority, in a great democracy like yours, will probably lie. At any rate, let us for a moment agree to suppose so. And the philosophers and the prophets-whom I at any rate am disposed to believe-and who say that moral causes govern the standing and the falling of states, will tell us that the failure to mind whatsoever things are elevated must impair with an inexorable fatality the life of a nation, just as the failure to mind whatsoever things are just, or whatsoever things are pure, will impair it; and that if the failure to mind whatsoever things are elevated should be real in your American democracy, and should grow into a disease, and take firm hold on you, then the life of even these great United States must inevitably be impaired more and more until it perish.

Then from this hard doctrine we will betake ourselves to the more comfortable doctrine of the remnant. "The remnant shall return;" shall convert and be healed itself first, and shall then recover the unsound majority. And you are fifty millions, and growing apace. What a remnant yours may be surely! A remnant of how great numbers, how mighty strength, how irresistible efficacy! Yet we must

not go too fast, either, nor make too sure of our efficacious remnant. Mere multitudes will not give us a saving remnant with certainty. The Assyrian empire had multitude, the Roman empire had multitude! yet neither the one nor the other could produce a sufficing remnant, any more than