“Thither in your adversity
  Do you betake yourselves for light,
  But strangely misinterpret all you hear. 
  For you will not put on
  New hearts with the inquirer’s holy robe
  And purged considerate minds”—­

not to ask what, poetically speaking, is the difference between this and the following—­

  “To college in the pursuit of duly
  Did I betake myself for lecture;
  But very soon I got extremely wet,
  For I had not put on
  The stout ulster appropriate to Britain,
  And my umbrella was at home.”

But Palladium, if not magnificent, is reconciling, the Shakespearian Youth’s Agitations beautiful, and Growing Old delightful, not without a touch of terror.  It is the reply, the verneinung, to Browning’s magnificent Rabbi ben Ezra, and one has almost to fly to that stronghold in order to resist its chilling influence.  But it is poetry for all that, and whatever there is in it of weakness is redeemed, though not quite so poetically, by The Last Word.  The Lines written in Kensington Gardens (which had appeared with Empedocles, but were missed above) may be half saddened, half endeared to some by their own remembrance of the “black-crowned red-boled” giants there celebrated—­trees long since killed by London smoke, as the good-natured say, as others, by the idiotic tidiness of the gardeners, who swept the needles up and left the roots without natural comfort and protection.  And then, after lesser things, the interesting, if not intensely poetical, Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoon leads us to one of the most remarkable of all Mr Arnold’s poems, Bacchanalia, or the New Age.  The word remarkable has been used advisedly. Bacchanalia, though it has poignant and exquisite poetic moments, is not one of the most specially poetical of its author’s pieces.  But it is certainly his only considerable piece of that really poetic humour which is so rare and delightful a thing.  And, like all poetic humour, it oscillates between cynicism and passion almost bewilderingly.  For a little more of this what pages and pages of jocularity about Bottles and the Rev. Esau Hittall would we not have given! what volumes of polemic with the Guardian and amateur discussions of the Gospel of St John!  In the first place, note the metrical structure, the sober level octosyllables of the overture changing suddenly to a dance-measure which, for a wonder in English, almost keeps the true dactylic movement.  How effective is the rhetorical iteration of

  “The famous orators have shone,
  The famous poets sung and gone,”

and so on for nearly half a score of lines!  How perfect the sad contrast of the refrain—­

  “Ah! so the quiet was! 
  So was the hush!”

how justly set and felicitously worded the rural picture of the opening! how riotous the famous irruption of the New Agers! how adequate the quiet-moral of the end, that the Past is as the Present, and more also!  And then he went and wrote about Bottles!