It is, I believe, not so “correct” as it once was to admire this; but I confess indocility to correctness, at least the correctness which varies with fashion. The Forsaken Merman is not a perfect poem—­it has longueurs, though it is not long; it has those inadequacies, those incompetences of expression, which are so oddly characteristic of its author; and his elaborate simplicity, though more at home here than in some other places, occasionally gives a dissonance.  But it is a great poem—­one by itself, one which finds and keeps its own place in the foreordained gallery or museum, with which every true lover of poetry is provided, though he inherits it by degrees.  No one, I suppose, will deny its pathos; I should be sorry for any one who fails to perceive its beauty.  The brief picture of the land, and the fuller one of the sea, and that (more elaborate still) of the occupations of the fugitive, all have their own charm.  But the triumph of the piece is in one of those metrical coups which give the triumph of all the greatest poetry, in the sudden change from the slower movements of the earlier stanzas or strophes to the quicker sweep of the famous conclusion—­

  “The salt tide rolls seaward,
  Lights shine from the town”—­

to

  “She left lonely for ever
  The kings of the sea.”

Here the poet’s poetry has come to its own.

In Utrumque Paratus sounds the note again, and has one exceedingly fine stanza:—­

  “Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow,
      And faint the city gleams;
  Rare the lone pastoral huts—­marvel not thou! 
  The solemn peaks but to the stars are known,
  But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams;
  Alone the sun arises, and alone
      Spring the great streams.”

But Resignation, the last poem in the book, goes far higher.  Again, it is too long; and, as is not the case in the Merman, or even in The Strayed Reveller itself, the general drift of the poem, the allegory (if it be an allegory) of the two treadings of “the self-same road” with Fausta and so forth, is unnecessarily obscure, and does not tempt one to spend much trouble in penetrating its obscurity.  But the splendid passage beginning—­

  “The Poet to whose mighty heart,”

and ending—­

  “His sad lucidity of soul,”

has far more interest than concerns the mere introduction, in this last line itself, of one of the famous Arnoldian catchwords of later years.  It has far more than lies even in its repetition, with fuller detail, of what has been called the author’s main poetic note of half-melancholy contemplation of life.  It has, once more, the interest of poetry—­of poetical presentation, which is independent of any subject or intention, which is capable of being adapted perhaps to all, certainly to most, which lies in form, in sound, in metre, in imagery, in language, in suggestion—­rather than in matter, in sense, in definite purpose or scheme.