of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had theirs.”  If the main movement had been such as he thought of it, or if it had been of importance in the long run, there might be a sounder basis for this hope than now appears to be the case; but there can be no doubt, let the contemporary movement have been what it may, that Arnold’s mood is one that will not pass out of men’s hearts to-day nor to-morrow.

On the modern side the example of Wordsworth was most formative, and in fact it is common to describe Arnold as a Wordsworthian:  and so, in his contemplative attitude to nature, and in his habitual recourse to her, he was; but both nature herself as she appeared to him, and his mood in her presence, were very different from Wordsworth’s conception and emotion.  Arnold finds in nature a refuge from life, an anodyne, an escape; but Wordsworth, in going into the hills for poetical communion, passed from a less to a fuller and deeper life, and obtained an inspiration, and was seeking the goal of all his being.  In the method of approach, too, as well as in the character of the experience, there was a profound difference between the two poets.  Arnold sees with the outward rather than the inward eye.  He is pictorial in a way that Wordsworth seldom is; he uses detail much more, and gives a group or a scene with the externality of a painter.  The method resembles that of Tennyson rather than that of Wordsworth, and has more direct analogy with the Greek manner than with the modern and emotional schools; it is objective, often minute, and always carefully composed, in the artistic sense of that term.  The description of the river Oxus, for example, though faintly charged with suggested and allegoric meaning, is a noble close to the poem which ends in it.  The scale is large, and Arnold was fond of a broad landscape, of mountains, and prospects over the land; but one cannot fancy Wordsworth writing it.  So too, on a small scale, the charming scene of the English garden in ‘Thyrsis’ is far from Wordsworth’s manner:—­

     “When garden walks and all the grassy floor
     With blossoms red and white of fallen May
       And chestnut-flowers are strewn—­
     So have I heard the cuckoo’s parting cry,
     From the wet field, through the vext garden trees,
     Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze.”

This is a picture that could be framed:  how different from Wordsworth’s “wandering voice”!  Or to take another notable example, which, like the Oxus passage, is a fine close in the ’Tristram and Iseult,’—­the hunter on the arras above the dead lovers:—­

     “A stately huntsman, clad in green,
     And round him a fresh forest scene. 
     On that clear forest-knoll he stays,
     With his pack round him, and delays.

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