Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/141

 the lover of the masters of humane learning and art. That flows through these poems, and is supported by so rich a local colour that not even Tennyson has ever laid more fully a whole countryside before us. From every field and hilltop crowned with trees we see Oxford in the verse, her ancient colleges, her "dreaming spires," lovely in her peace, romantic in her memories, classic in her thought. Over every hill we wander in the verse, in the well-known woods, through the quiet villages, in the deep meadows where the flowers love their life, by the flowing of the Thames; in poetry so happy and so loving that each name strikes itself into a landscape before our eyes. And to add to the charm, Arnold has filled the landscape with humanity and its work, with shepherd and reaper, gipsies and scholars, hunters and oarsmen, dancing maidens and wandering youths, among whom, alive and gay, Thyrsis and the Scholar Gipsy, and a meditative Arnold, alive and serious, move and speak of the true aims, the just ideas, the grave conduct, of human life. The picture is delightful, and the urging power of it is love—the life-long love of an Oxford scholar for the shelter and inspiration of his youth. In no poems that Arnold wrote is his natural description better than it is in these.

His natural description to which I now turn, is always vivid, pictorial, accurate, done, to use his own phrase, with his eye on the subject. The adjectives which he chooses so carefully are so apt and striking