“indulge his genius.”  And so it is but rarely that we get things like the Scholar-Gipsy, like the Forsaken Merman, like the second Isolation; and when we do get such things there is sometimes, as in the case of the peroration to Sohrab and Rustum, and perhaps the splendid opening of Westminster Abbey and Thyrsis, a certain sense of parade, of the elaborate assumption of the singing-robe.  There is too seldom the sensation which Coleridge unconsciously suggested in the poem that heralded the poetry of the nineteenth century.  We do not feel that

  “The fair breeze blew, the while foam flew,
    The furrow followed free”—­

that

  “We were the first that ever burst
    Into that silent sea;”

but that a mighty launch of elaborate preparation is taking place, that we are pleased and orderly spectators standing round, and that the ship is gliding in due manner, but with no rush or burst, into the sea of poetry.  While elsewhere there may be even the sense of effort and preparation without the success.

But, once more, a poet is to be judged first by his best things, and secondly by a certain aura or atmosphere, by a nameless, intangible, but sensible quality, which, now nearer and fuller, now farther and fainter, is over his work throughout.  In both respects Mr Arnold passes the test.  The things mentioned above and others, even many others, are the right things.  They do not need the help of that rotten reed, the subject, to warrant and support them; we know that they are in accordance with the great masters, but we do not care whether they are or not.  They sound the poetic note; they give the poetic flash and iridescence; they cause the poetic intoxication.  Even in things not by any means of the best as wholes, you may follow that gleam safely.  The exquisite revulsion of the undertone in Bacchanalia—­

  “Ah! so the silence was,
    So was the hush;”

the honey-dropping trochees of the New Sirens; the description of the poet in Resignation; the outburst—­

  “What voices are these on the clear night air?”

of Tristram and Iseult; the melancholy meditation of A Summer Night and Dover Beach, with the plangent note so cunningly yet so easily accommodated to the general tone and motive of the piece,—­these and a hundred other things fulfil all the requirements of the true poetic criticism, which only marks, and only asks for, the differentia of poetry.

And this poetic moment—­this (if one may use the words, about another matter, of one who wrote no poetry, yet had more than all but three or four poets), this “exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, and ingression into the divine shadow” which poetry and poetry alone confers upon the fit readers of it—­is never far off or absent for long together in Mr Arnold’s