But the lover’s anticipation, too, is fulfilled, though as usual not quite as he made it; he wearies of his restless and yet unmasterful passion; he rather muses and morals in his usual key on the “way of a man with a maid” than complains or repines.  And then we go off for a time from Marguerite, though not exactly from Switzerland, in the famous “Obermann” stanzas, a variation of the Wordsworth memorial lines, melodious, but a very little impotent—­the English utterance of what Sainte-Beuve, I think, called “the discouraged generation of 1850.”  Now mere discouragement, except as a passing mood, though extremely natural, is also a little contemptible—­pessimism-and-water, mere peevishness to the “fierce indignation,” mere whining compared with the great ironic despair.  As for Consolation, which in form as in matter strongly resembles part of the Strayed Reveller, I must say, at the risk of the charge of Philistinism, that I cannot see why most of it should not have been printed as prose.  In fact, it would be a very bold and astonishingly ingenious person who, not knowing the original, perceived any verse-division in this—­

  “The bleak, stern hour, whose severe moments I would annihilate,
  is passed by others in warmth, light, joy.”

Nor perhaps can very much be said for some of the other things.  The sonnet afterwards entitled The World’s Triumphs is not strong; The Second Best is but “a chain of extremely valuable thoughts”; Revolution a conceit. The Youth of Nature and The Youth of Man do but take up less musically the threnos for Wordsworth.  But Morality is both rhyme and poetry; Progress is at least rhyme; and The Future, though rhymeless again, is the best of all Mr Arnold’s waywardnesses of this kind.  It is, however, in the earlier division of the smaller poems—­those which come between Empedocles and Tristram—­that the interest is most concentrated, and that the best thing—­better as far as its subject is concerned even than the Summer Night—­appears.  For though all does not depend upon the subject, yet of two poems equally good in other ways, that which has the better subject will be the better.  Here we have the bulk of the “Marguerite” or Switzerland poems—­in other words, we leave the windy vagaries of mental indigestion and come to the real things—­Life and Love.

The River does not name any one, though the “arch eyes” identify Marguerite; and Excuse, Indifference, and Too Late are obviously of the company.  But none of these is exactly of the first class.  We grow warmer with On the Rhine, containing, among other things, the good distich—­

  “Eyes too expressive to lie blue,
  Too lovely to be grey”;

on which Mr Swinburne gave a probably unconscious scholion as well as variation in his own—­