Page:Matthew Arnold (IA matthewarnold00harr).pdf/20

 I would ask those who fancy that modulation and polish are equivalent to music to repeat aloud these lines amongst many:—

—The sandy spits, the shore-lock'd lakes.— —Kept on after the grave, but not begun— —Couldst thou no better keep, O Abbey old!— —The strange scrawl'd rocks, the lonely sky— —From heaths starr'd with broom, And high rocks throw mildly On the blanch'd sands a gloom.

These last three verses from the Forsaken Merman, wherein Arnold perhaps came nearest to the echo of music and to pure fantasy. Again of Shakespeare has he not said that he was:—

Here in one line are seven sibilants, four 'selfs,' three sc., and twenty-nine consonants against twelve vowels in one verse. It was not thus that Shakespeare himself wrote sonnets, as when he said:—

Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye.

It must be remembered that Arnold wrote but little verse, and most of it in early life, that he was not by profession a poet, that he was a hardworked inspector of schools all his days, and that his prose work far exceeds his verse. This separates him from all his contemporary rivals, and partly explains his stiffness in rhyming, his small product, and his lack of melody. Had he been able like Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, to regard himself from first to last as a poet, to devote his whole life to poetry, to live the life 'of thought and of austerity within'—which he craved as poet, but did not achieve as a man—then he might have left us poems