examiner, to deprive it of the prize; but he must have been a sanguine
man who, in giving the author that prize, expected to receive from him
returns of poetry.

Yet they came. If we did not know that the middle of this century was
one of the nadirs of English[3] criticism, and if we did not know
further that even good critics often go strangely wrong both in praise
and in blame of new verse, it would be most surprising that _The
Strayed Reveller_ volume should have attracted so little attention.
It is full of faults, but that is part of the beauty of it. Some of
these faults are those which, persevering, prevented Mr Arnold from
attaining a higher position than he actually holds in poetry; but no
critic could know that. There is nothing here worse, or more
necessarily fatal, than many things in Tennyson's 1830 and 1832
collections: he overwent those, so might Mr Arnold have overgone
these. And the promise--nay, the performance--is such as had been seen
in no verse save Tennyson's, and the almost unnoticed Browning's, for
some thirty years. The title-poem, though it should have pleased even
a severe judge, might have aroused uncomfortable doubts even in an
amiable one. In the first place, its rhymelessness is a caprice, a
will-worship. Except blank verse, every rhymeless metre in English has
on it the curse of the _tour de force_, of the acrobatic. Campion
and Collins, Southey and Shelley, have done great things in it; but
neither _Rose-cheeked Laura_ nor _Evening_, neither the
great things in _Thalaba_ nor the great things in _Queen
Mab_, can escape the charge of being caprices. And caprice, as some
have held, is the eternal enemy of art.

But the caprice of _The Strayed Reveller_ does not cease with its
rhymelessness. The rhythm and the line-division are also studiously