Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/155

 are the most delightful, delightful even though their subject be sad. I have dwelt on the tenderness of their sadness. I have not dwelt on their contemplative beauty. They are pervaded by that retired contemplation of life a man may have who, flying from the storm of cities for a brief holiday, thinks the brief time into an eternity, and in the eternal hermitage of his soul muses on earth and human life.

These poems reach excellence, that rare thing Arnold himself loves so much, to whose lonely summit, the artist, climbing through rocks and mist, so seldom can attain. They are pure poetry, moving in a dance, serious and bright, graceful and grave in turn, to the Dorian pipe, "the Dorian strain." The soft recorders accompany the pastoral, the idyllic song, wise with thought, happy with noble phrase, filled with accurate and loving description of nature; and in it lives from line to line the contemplation of humanity.

Virgil and Theocritus have been infused into their manner and their verse, nor has Lycidas been quite forgotten. Yet they are not imitative; the atmosphere, the thought, the music, and the subject are Arnold's own. Although this classic echo is heard in them, they are modern, of the tempestuous age when they were written by one who, while he wrote them, looked on the tempest, but for their meditative hour was not tossed upon its waves. Some of the classic episodes seem a little out of place, especially that of the Tyrian trader and the Grecian coaster at the end of the Scholar