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 Merman it was in tune. It may be that it derived this excellence from the good composition of the piece. When the composition is good, the melody of the verse is also good. One excellence induces the other. And this may be said of the Scholar Gipsy and of Thyrsis. They are both well composed, and the melody of the verse in them is always good and sometimes exquisite.

The mention of these two pieces brings me to the elegiac poems. I have said that Arnold, having sorrows at the root of his life, wrote with peculiar excellence the elegy. To excel in the elegy is not easy. Of course, it is easier to write than an ode of triumph or a song of rapture like the Epithalamium of Spenser; but there are many pitfalls into which a poet may fall in building an elegy, and into these Arnold, being austere in thought and hating excess as much as he loved temperance, and always mingling thought with feeling, did not easily fall. There is a severe beauty, an intellectual force, in these elegiac poems which strengthens, as it intensifies, their emotion, and is, as it were, the skeleton round which imagination compacts their living body.

The first of these is Memorial Verses—written on Wordsworth in 1850—and they contrast in soothing, healing power with Byron's force and Goethe's calm. Few things have been better said, or with more delight. ful finish, than these on the influence of Wordsworth, and the roots of his power. Not quite so well said,