The wild boar rustles in his lair,
     The fierce hounds snuff the tainted air,
     But lord and hounds keep rooted there. 
     Cheer, cheer thy dogs into the brake,
     O hunter! and without a fear
     Thy golden tasseled bugle blow”

But no one is deceived, and the hunter does not move from the arras, but is still “rooted there,” with his green suit and his golden tassel.  The piece is pictorial, and highly wrought for pictorial effects only, obviously decorative and used as stage scenery precisely in the manner of our later theatrical art, with that accent of forethought which turns the beautiful into the aesthetic.  This is a method which Wordsworth never used.  Take one of his pictures, the ‘Reaper’ for example, and see the difference.  The one is out-of-doors, the other is of the studio.  The purpose of these illustrations is to show that Arnold’s nature-pictures are not only consciously artistic, with an arrangement that approaches artifice, but that he is interested through his eye primarily and not through his emotions.  It is characteristic of his temperament also that he reminds one most often of the painter in water-colors.

If there is this difference between Arnold and Wordsworth in method, a greater difference in spirit is to be anticipated.  It is a fixed gulf.  In nature Wordsworth found the one spirit’s “plastic stress,” and a near and intimate revelation to the soul of truths that were his greatest joy and support in existence.  Arnold finds there no inhabitancy of God, no such streaming forth of wisdom and beauty from the fountain heads of being; but the secret frame of nature is filled only with the darkness, the melancholy, the waiting endurance that is projected from himself:—­

     “Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread,
     The solemn hills about us spread,
     The stream that falls incessantly,
     The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky,
     If I might lend their life a voice,
     Seem to bear rather than rejoice.”

Compare this with Wordsworth’s ‘Stanzas on Peele Castle,’ and the important reservations that must be borne in mind in describing Arnold as a Wordsworthian will become clearer.  It is as a relief from thought, as a beautiful and half-physical diversion, as a scale of being so vast and mysterious as to reduce the pettiness of human life to nothingness,—­it is in these ways that nature has value in Arnold’s verse.  Such a poet may describe natural scenes well, and obtain by means of them contrast to human conditions, and decorative beauty; but he does not penetrate nature or interpret what her significance is in the human spirit, as the more emotional poets have done.  He ends in an antithesis, not in a synthesis, and both nature and man lose by the divorce.  One looks in vain for anything deeper than landscapes in Arnold’s treatment of nature; she is emptied of her own infinite, and has become spiritually void:  and in the simple great line in which he gave the sea—­