yet quite) laughed out of existence.  That Mr Arnold’s own poems had had any widely extended sale or reading could hardly be said; but they were read by those who were or were shortly to be themselves read.  You had not to look far in any Oxford college (I cannot speak of Cambridge) before you found them on those undergraduate shelves which mean so much; while many who, from general distaste to poetry or from accident, knew them not, or hardly knew them, were familiar with their author’s prose work, or at least knew him as one whom others knew.

The volume itself was well calculated to take advantage, to at least a moderate extent, of this conjunction of circumstance.  At no time was the appeal of Mr Arnold’s poetry of the most impetuous or peremptory order.  And it might be contended that this collection contains nothing quite up to the very best things of the earlier poems, to the Shakespeare sonnet, to The Scholar-Gipsy, to the Isolation stanzas.  But with the majority of its readers it was sure rather to send them to these earlier things than to remind them thereof, and its own attractions were abundant, various, and strong.

In the poet himself there was perhaps a slight consciousness of “the silver age.”  The prefatory Stanzas, a title changed in the collected works to Persistency of Poetry, sound this note—­

  “Though the Muse be gone away,
  Though she move not earth to-day,
  Souls, erewhile who caught her word,
  Ah! still harp on what they heard.”

A confession perhaps a little dangerous, when the Muses were speaking in no uncertain tones not merely to juniors like Mr Morris and Mr Swinburne but to seniors like Tennyson and Browning.  But the actual contents were more than reassuring.  Of Empedocles it is not necessary to speak again:  Thyrsis could not but charm.  The famous line,

  “And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,”

sets the key dangerously high; but it is kept by the magnificent address to the cuckoo,

  “Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?”

and the flower-piece that follows; by that other single masterpiece,

  “The coronals of that forgotten time;”

by the more solemn splendour of the stanza beginning

  “And long the way appears which seemed so short;”

by the Signal tree; and by the allegoric close with the reassertion of the Scholar.  All these things stand by themselves, hold their sure and reserved place, even in the rush and crowd of the poetry of the sixties, the richest, perhaps, since the time from 1805 to 1822.