Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/97

 is but a voice, not a living young man; the voice only of the half-reaction in Arnold's mind towards life and untroubled joy. Callicles sings of what he sees; of the pleasant outside of things, of the loveliness of Nature, and of the natural life of men and animals, but the descriptions are a little too literary. He sings, and better, of the beautiful legends of Greece, of Cadmus and Harmonia, of Apollo and Marsvas, of the Ætnean giant, of the singing of the Muses, with youthful sentiment and artist charm; and Arnold thought these songs and the temper of them so good, that when he repressed the poem, he extracted and published some of them as separate lyrics. Indeed, these two regions, the beauty of the common world and the great stories, were the homes where Arnold found some comfort in his trouble, some hours of refreshment. They saved him from himself. In the physical peace of the one, and in the moral peace he was conscious of in the other, he attained so much of the resemblance of rest that he believed in its possibility. When he speaks of natural beauty, he loses his self-inquiring self. When he tells a fair or noble tale, the intellectual snake which was gnawing at his entrails goes to sleep, and the frigid weight of his stoicism was lifted off. He forgot himself—that blessed remedy for all the afflictions of the world. In the Strayed Reveller, the Forsaken Merman, the King at Bokhara, in Sohrab and Rustum, Balder Dead, Tristram and Iseult, the Church at Brou, the weary, self-inquiring, self-controlling Arnold does