“Those eyes, the greenest of things blue,
  The bluest of things grey.”

The intense pathos, which the poet could rarely “let himself go” sufficiently to reach, together with the seventeenth-century touch which in English not unfrequently rewards the self-sacrifice necessary to scholarly poets in such abandonment, appears in Longing; The Lake takes up the faint thread of story gracefully enough; and Parting does the same with more importance in a combination, sometimes very effective, of iambic couplets and anapaestic strophes, and with a touch of direct if not exalted nature in its revelation of that terrible thing, retrospective jealousy, in the lover.  Woe to the man who allows himself to think—­

  “To the lips! ah! of others
    Those lips have been pressed,
  And others, ere I was,
    Were clasped to that breast,”

and who does not at once exorcise the demon with the fortunately all-potent spell of Bocca bacciata, and the rest! Absence and Destiny show him in the same Purgatory; and it is impossible to say that he has actually escaped in the crowning poem of the series—­the crowning-point perhaps of his poetry, the piece beginning

  “Yes! in the sea of life enisled.”

It is neither uninteresting nor unimportant that this exquisite piece, by a man’s admiration of which (for there are some not wholly lost, who do not admire it) his soundness in the Catholic Faith of poetry may be tested, perhaps as well as by any other, has borne more than one or two titles, It is in the 1852 volume, To Marguerite.  In returning a volume of the letters of Ortis.  In 1853 it became Isolation, its best name; and later it took the much less satisfactory one of To Marguerite—­continued, being annexed to another.

Isolation is preferable for many reasons; not least because the actual Marguerite appears nowhere in the poem, and, except in the opening monosyllable, can hardly be said to be even rhetorically addressed.  The poet’s affection—­it is scarcely passion—­is there, but in transcendence:  he meditates more than he feels.  And that function of the riddle of the painful earth which Lucretius, thousands of years ago, put in his grim Nequicquam! which one of Mr Arnold’s own contemporaries formulated with less magnificence and more popularity, but still with music and truth in Strangers Yet—­here receives almost its final poetical expression.  The image—­the islands in the sea—­is capitally projected in the first stanza; it is exquisitely amplified in the second; the moral comes with due force in the third; and the whole winds up with one of the great poetic phrases of the century—­one of the “jewels five [literally five!] words long” of English verse—­a phrase complete and final, with epithets in unerring cumulation—­

  “The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.”