the sonnet To a Friend, praising Homer and Epictetus and Sophocles, for it seems to some to have a smatch of priggishness.  Nor am I one of those who think very highly of the much longer Sick King in Bokhara which (with a fragment of an Antigone, whereof more hereafter) follows, as this sonnet precedes, The Strayed Reveller itself.  There is “the note,” again, and I daresay the orientalism has the exactness of colour on which, as we know from the Letters, Mr Arnold prided himself.  Yet the handling of the piece seems to me prolix and uncertain, and the drift either very obscure or somewhat unimportant.  But about the Shakespeare sonnet which follows there can be no controversy among the competent.  “Almost adequate” is in such a case the highest praise; and it must be given.

The companions of this sonnet are respectable, but do not deserve much warmer words; and then we turn to a style of poem remarkably different from anything which the author had yet published and from most of his subsequent work.  It is not unnoteworthy that the batch of poems called in the later collected editions Switzerland, and completed at last by the piece called On the Terrace at Berne, appeared originally piecemeal, and with no indication of connection.  The first of its numbers is here, To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender Leave-taking.  It applies both the note of thought which has been indicated, and the quality of style which had already disengaged itself, to the commonest—­the greatest—­theme of poetry, but to one which this poet had not yet tried—­to Love.  Let it be remembered that the thought has the cast of a strictly pessimist quietism—­that the style aims, if it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and quakerish elegance, a sort of childlike grace.  There is, however, by no means any great austerity in the tone:  on the contrary, the refrain (altered later)—­

  “Ere the parting kiss be dry,
  Quick! thy tablets, Memory!”—­

approaches the luscious.  It is not easy to decide, and it is perhaps in both senses impertinent to speculate, whether the “Marguerite” (whose La Tour-like portrait is drawn in this piece with such relish, and who is so philosophically left to her fate by her lover on the Terrace at Berne later) had any live original.  She seems a little more human in some ways than most of those cloud-Junos of the poets, the heroines of sonnet-sequence and song-string.  She herself has a distinct touch of philosophy, anticipating with nonchalant resignation the year’s severance, and with equally nonchalant anticipation the time when

  “Some day next year I shall be,
  Entering heedless, kissed by thee.”

Her wooer paints her with gusto, but scarcely with ardour; and ends with the boding note—­

  “Yet, if little stays with man,
  Ah! retain we all we can!”—­