To meet such personality in a book was a bracing experience; and for many these essays were an awakening of the mind itself.  We may go to others for the greater part of what criticism can give,—­for definite and fundamental principles, for adequate characterization, for the intuition and the revelation, the penetrant flash of thought and phrase:  but Arnold generates and supports a temper of mind in which the work of these writers best thrives even in its own sphere; and through him this temper becomes less individual than social, encompassing the whole of life.  Few critics have been really less “disinterested,” few have kept their eyes less steadily “upon the object”:  but that fact does not lessen the value of his precepts of disinterestedness and objectivity; nor is it necessary, in becoming “a child of light,” to join in spirit the unhappy “remnant” of the academy, or to drink too deep of that honeyed satisfaction, with which he fills his readers, of being on his side.  As a critic, Arnold succeeds if his main purpose does not fail, and that was to reinforce the party of ideas, of culture, of the children of light; to impart, not moral vigor, but openness and reasonableness of mind; and to arouse and arm the intellectual in contradistinction to the other energies of civilization.

The poetry of Arnold, to pass to the second portion of his work, was less widely welcomed than his prose, and made its way very slowly; but it now seems the most important and permanent part.  It is not small in quantity, though his unproductiveness in later years has made it appear that he was less fluent and abundant in verse than he really was.  The remarkable thing, as one turns to his poems, is the contrast in spirit that they afford to the essays:  there is here an atmosphere of entire calm.  We seem to be in a different world.  This fact, with the singular silence of his familiar letters in regard to his verse, indicates that his poetic life was truly a thing apart.

In one respect only is there something in common between his prose and verse:  just as interest in human nature was absent in the latter, it is absent also in the former.  There is no action in the poems; neither is there character for its own sake.  Arnold was a man of the mind, and he betrays no interest in personality except for its intellectual traits; in Clough as in Obermann, it is the life of thought, not the human being, that he portrays.  As a poet, he expresses the moods of the meditative spirit in view of nature and our mortal existence; and he represents life, not lyrically by its changeful moments, nor tragically by its conflict in great characters, but philosophically by a self-contained and unvarying monologue, deeper or less deep in feeling and with cadences of tone, but always with the same grave and serious effect.  He is constantly thinking, whatever his subject or his mood; his attitude is intellectual, his sentiments are maxims, his conclusions are advisory.  His world is the sphere of thought, and his poems have the distance and repose and also the coldness that befit that sphere; and the character of his imagination, which lays hold of form and reason, makes natural to him the classical style.