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,