Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/137

 but said with more personal feeling and with Arnold's long affection for the Lake country made for the moment more tender by the death of Wordsworth, are the verses in the beginning of the poem, The Youth of Nature, where those strange lines occur which say that the age can rear no more poets, so blind Arnold was to the real significance of the time in which he lived.

Then there are the verses on his father—Rugby Chapel, 1857. They are written like the others without rhyme, in the form which Arnold often used, and which can only be perfectly used by an artist who, unlike Arnold, is a master of melody. Else he falls into prose, or, being unlimited by the austere rule of rhyme which ought to force concentration, he lets his thought run more loosely than it should. Into both these errors Arnold is sometimes betrayed in these rhymeless verses. Yet the deep, controlled, filial feeling with which he wrote this poem, and the steadfast matter of thought concerning human life which was born of the depth of his feeling, give to it so great a sincerity and so serious a spirituality, that no one can read it without being thrilled into sympathy by its moral power, and by its prophetic passion bettered in soul. It is an influence for life; and the close is noble—that close in which he paints the worn and weary hosts of mankind dispirited, scattered, and lost in the waste, but uplifted, cheered, and knit together by the great souls he always thought so few, but who are many more than he imagined:—