It is obvious that the sources of his poetical culture are Greek.  It is not merely, however, that he takes for his early subjects Merope and Empedocles, or that he strives in ‘Balder Dead’ for Homeric narrative, or that in the recitative to which he was addicted he evoked an immelodious phantom of Greek choruses; nor is it the “marmoreal air” that chills while it ennobles much of his finest work.  One feels the Greek quality not as a source but as a presence.  In Tennyson, Keats, and Shelley, there was Greek influence, but in them the result was modern.  In Arnold the antiquity remains; remains in mood, just as in Landor it remains in form.  The Greek twilight broods over all his poetry.  It is pagan in philosophic spirit; not Attic, but of a later and stoical time, with the very virtues of patience, endurance, suffering, not in their Christian types, but as they now seem to a post-Christian imagination looking back to the imperial past.  There is a difference, it is true, in Arnold’s expression of the mood:  he is as little Sophoclean as he is Homeric, as little Lucretian as he is Vergilian.  The temperament is not the same, not a survival or a revival of the antique, but original and living.  And yet the mood of the verse is felt at once to be a reincarnation of the deathless spirit of Hellas, that in other ages also has made beautiful and solemn for a time the shadowed places of the Christian world.  If one does not realize this, he must miss the secret of the tranquillity, the chill, the grave austerity, as well as the philosophical resignation, which are essential to the verse.  Even in those parts of the poems which use romantic motives, one reason of their original charm is that they suggest how the Greek imagination would have dealt with the forsaken merman, the church of Brou, and Tristram and Iseult.  The presence of such motives, such mythology, and such Christian and chivalric color in the work of Arnold does not disturb the simple unity of its feeling, which finds no solvent for life, whatever its accident of time and place and faith, except in that Greek spirit which ruled in thoughtful men before the triumph of Christianity, and is still native in men who accept the intellect as the sole guide of life.

It was with reference to these modern men and the movement they took part in, that he made his serious claim to greatness; to rank, that is, with Tennyson and Browning, as he said, in the literature of his time.  “My poems,” he wrote, “represent on the whole the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century; and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions that reflect it.  It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigor and abundance than Browning; yet because I have, perhaps, more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line