of its author’s longer pieces—­namely, that neither story nor character-drawing was his forte, that the dialogue is too colourless, and that though the description is often charming, it is seldom masterly.  As before, there are jarring rhymes—­“school” and “oracle,” “Faun” and “scorn.”  Empedocles himself is sometimes dreadfully tedious; but the part of Callicles throughout is lavishly poetical.  Not merely the show passages—­that which the Roman father,

  “Though young, intolerably severe,”

saved from banishment and retained by itself in the 1853 volume, as Cadmus and Harmonia, and the beautiful lyrical close,—­but the picture of the highest wooded glen on Etna, and the Flaying of Marsyas, are delightful things.

Tristram and Iseult, with fewer good patches, has a greater technical interest.  It is only one, but it is the most remarkable, of the places where we perceive in Mr Arnold one of the most curious of the notes of transition-poets.  They will not frankly follow another’s metrical form, and they cannot strike out a new one for themselves.  In this piece the author—­most attractively to the critic, if not always quite satisfactorily to the reader—­makes for, and flits about, half-a-dozen different forms of verse.  Now it is the equivalenced octosyllable of the Coleridgean stamp rather than of Scott’s or Byron’s; now trochaic decasyllabics of a rather rococo kind; and once at least a splendid anapaestic couplet, which catches the ear and clings to the memory for a lifetime—­

  “What voices are these on the clear night air? 
  What lights in the court?  What steps on the stair?”

But the most interesting experiment by far is in the rhymed heroic, which appears fragmentarily in the first two parts and substantively in the third.  The interest of this, which (one cannot but regret it) Mr Arnold did not carry further, relapsing on a stiff if stately blank verse, is not merely intrinsic, but both retrospective and prospective.  It is not the ordinary “stopped” eighteenth-century couplet at all; nor the earlier one of Drayton and Daniel.  It is the “enjambed,” very mobile, and in the right hands admirably fluent and adaptable couplet, which William Browne and Chamberlayne practised in the early and middle seventeenth century, which Leigh Hunt revived and taught to Keats, and of which, later than Mr Arnold himself, Mr William Morris was such an admirable practitioner.  Its use here is decidedly happy; and the whole of this part shows in Mr Arnold a temporary Romantic impulse, which again we cannot but regret that he did not obey.  The picture-work of the earlier lines is the best he ever did.  The figure of Iseult with the White Hands stands out with the right Prae-Raphaelite distinctness and charm; and the story of Merlin and Vivian, with which, in the manner so dear to him, he diverts the attention of the reader from the main topic at the end, is beautifully told.  For attaching quality on something like a large scale I should put this part of Tristram and Iseult much above both Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead; but the earlier parts are not worthy of it, and the whole, like Empedocles, is something of a failure, though both poems afford ample consolation in passages.