Most of the new poems here are at a level but a little lower than this part of Sohrab and Rustum, while some of them are even above it as wholes. Philomela is beautiful, in spite of the obstinate will-worship of its unrhymed Pindaric:  the Stanzas to the Memory of Edward Quillinan are really pathetic, though slightly irritating in their “sweet simplicity”; and if Thekla’s Answer is nothing particular, The Neckan nothing but a weaker doublet of the Merman, A Dream is noteworthy in itself, and as an outlier of the Marguerite group.  Then we have three things, of which the first is, though unequal, great at the close, while the other two rank with the greatest things Mr Arnold ever did.  These are The Church of Brou, Requiescat, and The Scholar-Gipsy.

If, as no critic ever can, the critic could thoroughly discover the secret of the inequality of The Church of Brou, he might, like the famous pedant, “put away” Mr Arnold “fully conjugated in his desk.”  The poem is in theme and scheme purely Romantic, and “nineteenth century” in its looking back to a simple and pathetic story of the Middle Age—­love, bereavement, and pious resignation.  It is divided into three parts.  The first, in trochaic ballad metre, telling the story, is one of the poet’s weakest things.  You may oft see as good in Helen Maria Williams and the Delia Cruscans.  The second, describing the church where the duke and duchess sleep, in an eight-line stanza of good fashion, is satisfactory but nothing more.  And then the third, after a manner hardly paralleled save in Crashaw’s Flaming Heart, breaks from twaddle and respectable verse into a rocket-rush of heroic couplets, scattering star-showers of poetry all over and round the bewildered reader.  It is artifice rather than art, perhaps, to lisp and drawl, that, when you do speak out, your speech may be the more effective.  But hardly anything can make one quarrel with such a piece of poetry as that beginning—­

  “So rest, for ever rest, O princely pair!”

and ending—­

  “The rustle of the eternal rain of Love.”

On the other hand, in Requiescat there is not a false note, unless it be the dubious word “vasty” in the last line; and even that may shelter itself under the royal mantle of Shakespeare.  The poet has here achieved what he too often fails in, the triple union of simplicity, pathos, and (in the best sense) elegance.  The dangerous repetitions of “roses, roses,” “tired, tired,” &c., come all right; and above all he has the flexibility and quiver of metre that he too often lacks.  His trisyllabic interspersions—­the leap in the vein that makes iambic verse alive and passionate—­are as happy as they can be, and the relapse into the uniform dissyllabic gives just the right contrast.  He must be [Greek:  e therion e theos]—­and whichever he be, he is not to be envied—­who can read Requiescat for the first or the fiftieth time without mist in the eyes and without a catch in the voice.