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 distinctive touches of expression and feeling, such traces of a bright clear sense of beauty and charm and meaning in nature, that it was but just, when the man was well dead and could get no good of it and no harm, to praise him without grudging and pick up his leavings as a windfall. A place in the cabinet of M. Sainte-Beuve was no more than his desert. But the place which Mr. Arnold assigns him is reserved for men far other than this tender dreamer: five minutes of their life outweigh five centuries of such lives as his; one breath of the common air of their spirit would burn up the little tremulous soul as with fire. No tender Semele, but the queen of heaven alone, can face and enjoy the lightning of heaven. Of the contact of mortal and immortal, ashes are the only fruits. In Keats there was something of the spirit and breath of the world, of the divine life of things; in Guérin there was hardly a soft breathless pulse of fluttering sympathy; here was the anima mundi, made flesh once more in the body of a divine interpreter such as all great poets must be after their kind; there was the animula vagula, blandula, of a tentative, sensitive, impressible nature; full of little native pieties and sincere little sensibilities, amiable and laudable enough. But the demigods of our kind are not cast in such clay as that M. Sainte-Beuve knew better than Mr. Arnold what was the rank and what the kindred of their foster-child when he called him a latter-day Lakist. If we must needs find him kinsmen among English poets, he may take his stand as a subordinate in the school of Gray or the