seeming to be at least as doubtful of his own constancy as of hers.  Nor do we meet her again in the volume.  The well-known complementary pieces which make up Switzerland were either not written, or held back.

The inferior but interesting Modern Sappho, almost the poet’s only experiment in “Moore-ish” method and melody—­

  “They are gone—­all is still!  Foolish heart, dost thou quiver?”—­

is a curiosity rather than anything else.  The style is ill suited to the thought; besides, Matthew Arnold, a master at times of blank verse, and of the statelier stanza, was less often an adept at the lighter and more rushing lyrical measures.  He is infinitely more at home in the beautiful New Sirens, which, for what reason it is difficult to discover, he never reprinted till many years later, partly at Mr Swinburne’s most judicious suggestion.  The scheme is trochaic, and Mr Arnold (deriving beyond all doubt inspiration from Keats) was happier than most poets with that charming but difficult foot.  The note is the old one of yearning rather than passionate melancholy, applied in a new way and put most clearly, though by no means most poetically, in the lines—­

    “Can men worship the wan features,
    The sunk eyes, the wailing tone,
    Of unsphered, discrowned creatures,
  Souls as little godlike as their own?”

The answer is, “No,” of course; but, as some one informed Mr Arnold many years later, we knew that before, and it is distressing to be told it, as we are a little later, with a rhyme of “dawning” and “morning.”  Yet the poem is a very beautiful one—­in some ways the equal of its author’s best up to this time; at least he had yet done nothing except the Shakespeare sonnet equal to the splendid stanza beginning—­

  “And we too, from upland valleys;”

and the cry of the repentant sirens, punished as they had sinned—­

  “‘Come,’ you say, ‘the hours are dreary.’”

Yet the strong Tennysonian influence (which the poet rather ungraciously kicked against in his criticism) shows itself here also; and we know perfectly well that the good lines—­

  “When the first rose flush was steeping
  All the frore peak’s awful crown”—­

are but an unconscious reminiscence of the great ones—­

  “And on the glimmering summit far withdrawn,
  God made himself an awful rose of dawn.”

He kept this level, though here following not Tennyson or Keats but Shelley, in the three ambitious and elaborate lyrics, The Voice, To Fausta, and Stagirius, fine things, if somehow a little suggestive of inability on their author’s part fully to meet the demands of the forms he attempts—­“the note,” in short, expressed practically as well as in theory. Stagirius in particular wants but a very little to be a perfect expression of the obstinate questionings of the century; and yet wanting a little, it wants so much!  Others, To a Gipsy Child and The Hayswater Boat (Mr Arnold never reprinted this), are but faint Wordsworthian echoes; and thus we come to The Forsaken Merman.