“What shelter to grow ripe is ours? 
  What leisure to grow wise? 
  Like children bathing on the shore,
  Buried a wave beneath,
  The second wave succeeds, before
  We have had time to breathe.”

But Arnold is not the seer to tell us how to enter the vale of rest, how to answer the voice of doubt.  He passes through life a lonely figure—­

  “Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
  The other powerless to be born.” [14]

The only creed that he offers humanity is one born of the scientific temper, a creed of stoical endurance and unswerving allegiance to the voice of duty.  Many readers miss in Arnold the solace that they find in Wordsworth and the tonic faith that is omnipresent in Browning.  Arnold himself was not wholly satisfied with his creed; but his cool reason refused him the solace of an unquestioning faith.  Arnold has been called “the poet of the Universities,” because of the reflective scholarly thought in his verse.  It breathes the atmosphere of books and of the study.  Such poetry cannot appeal to the masses.  It is for the thinker.

The style of verse that lends itself best to Arnold’s genius is the elegiac lyric. The Scholar Gypsy and its companion piece Thyrsis, Memorial Verses, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, and Stanzas in Memory of the Author of “Obermann" are some of his best elegies.

Sohrab and Rustam and Balder Dead are Arnold’s finest narrative poems.  They are stately, dignified recitals of the deeds of heroes and gods.  The series of poems entitled Switzerland and Dover Beach are among Arnold’s most beautiful lyrics.  A fine description of the surf is contained in the last-named poem:—­

  “Listen! you hear the grating roar
  Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
  At their return, up the high strand,
  Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
  The eternal note of sadness in.”

Neither the movement of the narrative nor the lightness of the lyric is wholly congenial to Arnold’s introspective melancholy muse.

Prose Works.—­Although Arnold’s first works were in poetry, he won recognition as a prose writer before he was widely known as a poet.  His works in prose comprise such subjects as literary criticism, education, theology, and social ethics.  As a critic of literature, he surpasses all his great contemporaries.  Neither Macaulay nor Carlyle possessed the critical acumen, the taste, ana the cultivated judgment of literary works, in such fullness as Matthew Arnold.

His greatest contributions to critical literature are the various magazine articles that were collected in the two volumes entitled Essays in Criticism (1865-1888).  In these essays Arnold displays great breadth of culture and fairness of mind.  He rises superior to the narrow provincialism and racial prejudices that he deprecates in other criticisms of literature.  He gives the same sympathetic consideration to the German Heine and the Frenchman Joubert as to Wordsworth.  Arnold further insists that Frenchmen should study English literature for its serious ethical spirit, and that Englishmen would be benefited by a study of the lightness, precision, and polished form of French literature.