Saint Brandan, which follows, has pathos if not great power, and connects itself agreeably with those Celtic and mediaeval studies which had just attracted and occupied Mr Arnold.  The sonnets which form the next division might be variously judged.  None of them equals the Shakespeare; and one may legitimately hold the opinion that the sonnet was not specially Mr Arnold’s form.  Its greatest examples have always been reached by the reflex, the almost combative, action of intense poetic feeling—­Shakespeare’s, Milton’s, Wordsworth’s, Rossetti’s—­and intensity was not Mr Arnold’s characteristic.  Yet Austerity of Poetry, East London, and Monica’s Last Prayer must always stand so high in the second class that it is hardly critical weakness to allow them the first.  And then the tide rises. Calais Sands may not be more than very pretty, but it is that, and Dover Beach is very much more.  Mr Arnold’s theological prepossessions and assumptions may appear in it, and it may be unfortunately weak as an argument, for except the flood itself nothing is so certain a testimony to the flood as the ebb.  But the order, the purpose, the argument, the subject, matter little to poetry.  The expression, the thing that is not the subject, the tendency outside the subject, which makes for poetry, are here, and almost of the very best.  Here you have that passionate interpretation of life, which is so different a thing from the criticism of it; that marvellous pictorial effect to which the art of line and colour itself is commonplace and banal, and which prose literature never attains except by a tour de force; that almost more marvellous accompaniment of vowel and consonant music, independent of the sense but reinforcing it, which is the glory of English poetry among all, and of nineteenth-century poetry among all English, poetries.  As is the case with most Englishmen, the sea usually inspired Mr Arnold—­it is as natural to great English poets to leave the echo of the very word ringing at the close of their verse as it was to Dante to end with “stars.”  But it has not often inspired any poet so well as this, nor anywhere this poet better than here.  If at any time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with some confidence, it is where he disagrees with the sentiment and admires the poem; and for my part I find in Dover Beach, even without the Merman, without the Scholar-Gipsy, without Isolation, a document which I could be content to indorse “Poetry, sans phrase.”

The Terrace at Berne has been already dealt with, but that mood for epicede, which was so frequent in Mr Arnold, finds in the Carnac stanzas adequate, and in A Southern Night consummate, expression. The Fragment of Chorus of a Dejaneira, written long before, but now first published, has the usual faults of Mr Arnold’s rhymeless verse.  It is really quite impossible, when one reads such stuff as—­