is perhaps rather learnt from Wordsworth, yet it does not fail to strike the note which fairly differentiates the Arnoldian variety of Wordsworthianism—­the note which rings from Resignation to Poor Matthias, and which is a very curious cross between two things that at first sight may seem unmarriageable, the Wordsworthian enthusiasm and the Byronic despair.  But of this[4] more when we have had more of its examples before us.  The second piece in the volume must, or should, have struck—­for there is very little evidence that it did strike—­readers of the volume as something at once considerable and, in no small measure, new. Mycerinus, a piece of some 120 lines or so, in thirteen six-line stanzas and a blank-verse coda, is one of those characteristic poems of this century, which are neither mere “copies of verses,” mere occasional pieces, nor substantive compositions of the old kind, with at least an attempt at a beginning, middle, and end.  They attempt rather situations than stories, rather facets than complete bodies of thought, or description, or character.  They supply an obvious way of escape for the Romantic tendency which does not wish to break wholly with classical tradition; and above all, they admit of indulgence in that immense variety which seems to have become one of the chief devices of modern art, attempting the compliances necessary to gratify modern taste.

The Herodotean anecdote of the Egyptian King Mycerinus, his indignation at the sentence of death in six years as a recompense for his just rule, and his device of lengthening his days by revelling all night, is neither an unpromising nor a wholly promising subject.  The foolish good sense of Mr Toots would probably observe—­and justly—­that before six years, or six months, or even six days were over, King Mycerinus must have got very sleepy; and the philosophic mind would certainly recall the parallel of Cleobis and Biton as to the best gift for man.  Mr Arnold, however, draws no direct moral.  The stanza-part of the poem, the king’s expostulation, contains very fine poetry, and “the note” rings again throughout it, especially in the couplet—­

  “And prayers, and gifts, and tears, are fruitless all,
  And the night waxes, and the shadows fall.”

The blank-verse tail-piece is finer still in execution; it is, with the still finer companion-coda of Sohrab and Rustum, the author’s masterpiece in the kind, and it is, like that, an early and consummate example of Mr Arnold’s favourite device of finishing without a finish, of “playing out the audience,” so to speak, with something healing and reconciling, description, simile, what not, to relieve the strain of his generally sad philosophy and his often melancholy themes.

One may less admire, despite its famous and often-quoted line,

  “Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole,”