The smaller pieces, however, could have saved the volume had their larger companions been very much weaker.  The Memorial Verses on Wordsworth (published first in Fraser) have taken their place once for all.  If they have not the poetical beauty in different ways of Carew on Donne, of Dryden on Oldham, even of Tickell upon Addison, of Adonais above all, of Wordsworth’s own beautiful Effusion on the group of dead poets in 1834, they do not fall far short even in this respect.  And for adequacy of meaning, not unpoetically expressed, they are almost supreme.  If Mr Arnold’s own unlucky and maimed definition of poetry as “a criticism of life” had been true, they would be poetry in quintessence; and, as it is, they are poetry.

Far more so is the glorious Summer Night, which came near the middle of the book.  There is a cheering doctrine of mystical optimism which will have it that a sufficiently intense devotion to any ideal never fails of at least one moment of consummate realisation and enjoyment.  Such a moment was granted to Matthew Arnold when he wrote A Summer Night.  Whether that rather vague life-philosophy of his, that erection of a melancholy agnosticism plus asceticism into a creed, was anything more than a not ungraceful or undignified will-worship of Pride, we need not here argue out.  But we have seen how faithfully the note of it rings through the verse of these years.  And here it rings not only faithfully, but almost triumphantly.  The lips are touched at last:  the eyes are thoroughly opened to see what the lips shall speak:  the brain almost unconsciously frames and fills the adequate and inevitable scheme.  And, as always at these right poetic moments, the minor felicities follow the major.  The false rhymes are nowhere; the imperfect phrases, the little sham simplicities or pedantries, hide themselves; and the poet is free, from the splendid opening landscape through the meditative exposition, and the fine picture of the shipwreck, to the magnificent final invocation of the “Clearness divine!”

His freedom, save once, is not so unquestionably exhibited in the remarkable group of poems—­the future constituents of the Switzerland group, but still not classified under any special head—­which in the original volume chiefly follow Empedocles, with the batch later called “Faded Leaves” to introduce them.  It is, perhaps, if such things were worth attempting at all, an argument for supposing some real undercurrent of fact or feeling in them, that they are not grouped at their first appearance, and that some of them are perhaps designedly separated from the rest.  Even the name “Marguerite” does not appear in A Farewell; though nobody who marked as well as read, could fail to connect it with the To my Friends of the former volume.  We are to suppose, it would appear, that the twelvemonth has passed, and that Marguerite’s anticipation of the renewed kiss is fulfilled in the first stanzas.