poetical qualities of Sophocles and Pindar, just as none has written so suggestively of translating Homer.

Like Goethe, Arnold assimilated Greek forms in many of his writings. Even after his master,' wrote Mr. Swinburne in 1867, this disciple of Sophocles holds his high place; he has matched against the Attic of the gods this Hyperborean dialect of ours, and has not earned the doom of Marsyas.' Such fragments as those from a Deianira and an Antigone are close imitations, while the lovely poem of The Strayed Reveller is as reminiscent of Greek form as of Greek matter. The special and characteristic Arnold metre, the unrhymed, lilting, quasianapaestic measure of Heine's Grave and Rugby Chapel, is a sort of adaptation, too, from Greek choric metres. It must not indeed be supposed, wrote Arnold in the preface to Merope, "that these last [he is speaking of the choruses there, but the words have a wider application] are the reproduction of any Greek choric measures. So to adapt Greek measures to English verse is impossible: what I have done is to try to follow rhythms which produced on my own feeling a similar impression to that produced on it by the rhythms of Greek choric poetry." The result is the metre of which we have spoken-Greek and yet not Greek; like the Attic chorus, but very different.

But just as there is a difference between the Attic and the Hyperborean in form, so there is in matter. Strongly as Arnold's view of the world, his "criticism of life," was influenced by Greek poetry and philosophy, there is a great, an essential distinction between him and his models. How comes it, people often ask, that he, over whose conversation, and over most of whose prose work, there played a delightful and a perpetual humour, should in his verse be so uniformly grave, so far removed from humour? How comes it that in his poetry he brings, not once nor twice, but perpetually, "the eternal note of sadness in"? The truth is, that verse was for him, except in two or three of the poems with which he amused some of his latest days, the expression of his gravest self, and his most abiding thought. And here there was, as it were, a permanent nostalgie of a simpler and earlier age; a pained sense that the modern mind, delight as it may in the forms that ancient art has left us, can never re-create for itself the moral atmosphere

in which that art had its origin. Hence the almost tragic note that sounds through so much of Arnold's poetry; the sad reflexion that he, whom nature and training had endowed with Hellenic clearness of vision and utterance, should have to express the thoughts of an age in which all is confusion and perplexity.

Hence, again, his fondness for certain types, repeating one another to a certain extent: Empedocles, who in his inability to live either for himself or in the world, plunges into the crater of Etna; the Scholar Gypsy, who seeks refuge among a primitive race from the torment of civilization; Obermann, retreating to the Swiss mountains to contemplate life and his own soul. That so much of Arnold's poetry is given up to this class of subjects and of thoughts is largely due to the fact that his early manhood, the time when his poetic production was most active, lay in those years of 'storm and stress," 1840 to 1850-the years of Chartism, of the "Oxford Movement," of continental revolution, of railway expansion, the years of Carlyle's greatest activity, and of George Sand's greatest effectiveness.

We have said that in counting up the literary influences that worked upon Arnold, the chief place must be given to the Greeks. He cared much less for the Latin than for the Greek writers, and was less touched by the charm of Virgil than Tennyson was; the lines to " The Mantovano," indeed, would have found as little response in him as would the alcaics "To Milton." In an Oxford lecture, famous at the time, but never printed, he called Lucretius "morbid "; another lecture, on Propertius, he often announced but never delivered. Of the author of Literature and Dogma it need hardly be said that the Bible, considered both as literature and as a storehouse of profound reflexions upon human life, had a strong and permanent influence upon him. Some of the Fathers touched him a good deal; he studied St. Augustine's Confessions and the Imitation, and felt their power and charm; and the Introduction to these volumes of ours has put on record his view of Dante, that crown and flower of the mediaeval Italian mind. But none of these were so much to him as the modernsShakespeare and Montaigne in their degree, Wordsworth and Byron of course, but most of all Goethe and some French

writers of his own generation. One of his most treasured books was a fine copy of the thirty-volume edition of Goethe, which he had read through and assimilated as he assimilated the Greek classics in his boyhood. The "wide and luminous view" of the writer whom Arnold called "the greatest poet of his time, the greatest critic of all times," had an extraordinary attraction for him. Sanity, the absence of caprice-these were to him the essential things; he found them in the Greeks, in Goethe, and the great French tradition from Molière to Leconte de Lisle, from Montaigne to Sainte-Beuve. It was because he did not find them in Victor Hugo'that he could never bring himself to join the body of that poet's votaries, and that he once said to the present writer, "There is more in the one little volume of André Chénier than in the whole forty volumes of Hugo."

It is hoped that the following selections, though far too brief to represent fully the work of a poet so rich in thought as Arnoid was, will be found to contain the most perfect, and many of the most suggestive and stimulating, of his poems. Many old favourites, indeed, will be missed altogether, and in two or three instances-not more-extracts have been given where the complete poems might have been expected or wished for. From a long narrative poem such as Sohrab and Rustum, this choice of a mere fragment was of course inevitable; and the Editor, after much consideration, has decided to exclude the whole of the beautiful early poem Resignation, except the famous page about the Poet. Arnold himself, though he never moved away from the conclusions of a poem which taught that the secret of life was "not joy but peace," came to regard it as faulty in workmanship, diffuse, and immature. One of the most interesting of his poems, speaking biographically, the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, has also been shut out, on the ground of a certain monotony in its composition; and the same fate, merely for reasons of space, has befallen that vivid summary, as it may be called, of the mental history of Europe, Obermann Once More. We have printed Thyrsis, but have been forced to omit the poem which is, as it were, the introduction to it, The Scholar Gypsy, though it is one of the most characteristic of all, and though the long simile with which it concludes is as famous as anything the author ever wrote. Again, we have

been forced to limit ourselves to one small fragment of Empedo cles on Etna, the Song of Callicles, and have had to exclude the splendid monologue of the philosopher. Arnold for many years condemned it himself, and withdrew from publication the whole poem for the reasons which he gave in the celebrated Preface of 1853; but reflexion and the persuasions of his friends led him to cancel the sentence of banishment, and Empedocles reappeared in the "New Poems" of 1867. Since that time it

has held its place in every edition, and the opinion of all readers of poetry has confirmed the inclusion of it, however true may have been the poet's feeling that it was wanting in dramatic action, and was, for enjoyment, too monotonously grave.

EDITOR.

TO A FRIEND.

Who prop, thou ask'st, in these bad days, my mind?—
He much, the old man, who, clearest-soul'd of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen',
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though biind.

Much he, whose friendship I not long since won
That halting slave, who in Nicopolis

Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son

Clear'd Rome of what most shamed him. But be his

My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild ;

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole;
The mellow glory of the Attic stage,
Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child.

SHAKESPEARE.

Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask-Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,
Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,

Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base

To the foil'd searching of mortality;

The name Europe (Evpn, the wide prospect) probably describes the appearance of the European coast to the Greeks on the coast of Asia Minor opposite. The name Asia, again, comes, it has been thought, from the muddy fens of the rivers of Asia Minor, such as the Cayster or Maeander, which struck the imagination of the Greeks living near them. (Author's Note.)