Page:Tennyson; the Leslie Stephen lecture.djvu/31

 spell of Puck and Oberon, and beginning at once:—

The will of man is by his reason sway'd.

But the poetical mode of thought is not shown best in the poet's moralising sentences. The noblest poetic thought has often very little that can be debated. The poetic discourse of Obermann cannot hold its own, for poetic wisdom, against the conclusion of Sohrab and Rustum, and if we were to choose, in Mr Arnold's own way, a passage of deep seriousness from his books, it might well be Cadmus and Harmonia rather than the song of Empedocles.

Two of the most solemn passages in all poetry are the argument of true Fame in