Page:Matthew Arnold (IA matthewarnold00harr).pdf/15

 primrose to him, and nothing more: it reveals the poet of the primrose. The ethical lesson of Nature, which is the uniform burden of Arnold's poetry, has been definitely summed up by him in the sonnet to a preacher who talked loosely of our 'harmony with Nature.'

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.

Not only is Arnold what Aristotle called, a moralist in verse, but his moral philosophy of life and man is at once large, wise, and deep. He is abreast of the best modern thought, and he meets the great problems of destiny and what is now called the 'foundations of belief,' like a philosopher and not like a rhetorician, a sentimentalist, or a theologian. The essential doctrine of his verse is the spirit of his own favourite hero, Marcus Aurelius, having (at least in aspiration if not in performance) the same stoicism, dignity, patience, and gentleness, and no little of the same pensive and ineffectual resignation under insoluble problems. Not to institute any futile comparison of genius, it must be conceded that Arnold in his poetry dwells in a higher philosophic æther than any contemporary poet. He has a wider learning, a cooler brain, and a more masculine logic. However superior in fancy and in melody, when Tennyson deals with the mysteries of philosophy, too often he descends into the vague commonplaces of hymnology, or the devotional rhapsodies of an ambitious curate denouncing the heresies of Darwin: And Browning, with all his mastery of dramatic psychology, has neither the philosophic training, nor the grasp of the ultimate problem of Man and his Environment which the instructed mind finds ever to the front with Arnold. It was not in vain that Arnold was so early inspired by echoes of Empedocles, to whom his earliest important