Human Life, no ill thing in itself, reads a little weakly after Isolation; but Despondency is a pretty piece of melancholy, and, with a comfortable stool, will suit a man well.  In the sonnet, When I shall be divorced, Mr Arnold tried the Elizabethan vein with less success than in his Shakespeare piece; and Self-Deception and Lines written by a Death-Bed, with some beauty have more monotony.  The closing lines of the last are at the same time the moral of the book and the formula of the Arnoldian “note”—­

  “Calm’s not life’s crown, though calm is well. 
  ’Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
  But ’tis not what our youth desires.”

Again, we remember some one’s parody-remonstrance thirty years later, and again we may think that the condemnation which Mr Arnold himself was soon to pronounce upon Empedocles is rather disastrously far-reaching, while even this phrase is a boomerang.  Musical and philosophical despair is one of the innumerable strings of the poetic lyre; but ’tis not what our youth, or our age either, desires for a monochord.

The remarkable manifesto just referred to was not long delayed.  Whatever may have been his opinion as to the reception of the two volumes “by A,” he made up his mind, a year after the issue and withdrawal of the second, to put forth a third, with his name, and containing, besides a full selection from the other two, fresh specimens of the greatest importance.  In the two former there had been no avowed “purpose”; here, not merely were the contents sifted on principle, the important Empedocles as well as some minor things being omitted:  not merely did some of the new numbers, especially Sohrab and Rustum, directly and intentionally illustrate the:  poet’s theories, but those theories themselves were definitely put in a Preface, which is the most important critical document issued in England for something like a generation, and which, as prefixed by a poet to his poetry, admits no competitors in English, except some work of Dryden’s and some of Wordsworth’s.

Beginning with his reasons for discarding Empedocles, reasons which he sums up in a sentence, famous, but too important not to require citation at least in a note,[5] he passes suddenly to the reasons which were not his, and of which he makes a good rhetorical starting-point for his main course.  The bad critics of that day had promulgated the doctrine, which they maintained till a time within the memory of most men who have reached middle life, though the error has since in the usual course given way to others—­that “the Poet must leave the exhausted past and draw his subjects from matters of present import.”  This was the genuine “Times-v.-all-the-works-of-Thucydides” fallacy of the mid-nineteenth century, the fine flower of Cobdenism, the heartfelt motto of Philistia—­as Philistia then was.  For other times other Philistines, and Ekron we have always with us, ready, as it was once said, “to bestow its freedom in pinchbeck boxes” on its elect.