One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee,
    One lesson which in every wind is blown,
    One lesson of two duties kept at one
    Though the loud world proclaim their enmity—­
    Of toil unsever’d from tranquillity;
    Of labour, that in lasting fruit outgrows
    Far noisier schemes, accomplish’d in repose,
    Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.

WORKS OF MATTHEW ARNOLD.  We shall better appreciate Arnold’s poetry if we remember two things:  First, he had been taught in his home a simple and devout faith in revealed religion, and in college he was thrown into a world of doubt and questioning.  He faced these doubts honestly, reverently,—­in his heart longing to accept the faith of his fathers, but in his head demanding proof and scientific exactness.  The same struggle between head and heart, between reason and intuition, goes on to-day, and that is one reason why Arnold’s poetry, which wavers on the borderland between doubt and faith, is a favorite with many readers.  Second, Arnold, as shown in his essay on The Study of Poetry, regarded poetry as “a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”  Naturally, one who regards poetry as a “criticism” will write very differently from one who regards poetry as the natural language of the soul.  He will write for the head rather than for the heart, and will be cold and critical rather than enthusiastic.  According to Arnold, each poem should be a unit, and he protested against the tendency of English poets to use brilliant phrases and figures of speech which only detract attention from the poem as a whole.  For his models he went to Greek poetry, which he regarded as “the only sure guidance to what is sound and true in poetical art.”  Arnold is, however, more indebted than he thinks to English masters, especially to Wordsworth and Milton, whose influence is noticeable in a large part of his poetry.

Of Arnold’s narrative poems the two best known are Balder Dead (1855), an incursion into the field of Norse mythology which is suggestive of Gray, and Sohrab and Rustum (1853), which takes us into the field of legendary Persian history.  The theme of the latter poem is taken from the Shah-Namah (Book of Kings) of the Persian poet Firdausi, who lived and wrote in the eleventh century.

Briefly, the story is of one Rustem or Rustum, a Persian Achilles, who fell asleep one day when he had grown weary of hunting.  While he slept a band of robbers stole his favorite horse, Ruksh.  In trailing the robbers Rustum came to the palace of the king of Samengan, where he was royally welcomed, and where he fell in love with the king’s daughter, Temineh, and married her.  But he was of a roving, adventurous disposition, and soon went back to fight among his own people, the Persians.  While he was gone his son Sohrab was born, grew to manhood, and became the hero of the