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Matthew Arnold by George Saintsbury
page 15 of 197 (07%)
but only such as are frequent in Shakespeare--

"They see the Indian drifting, knife in hand,
His frail boat moored to a floating isle--thick-matted
With large-leaved [_and_] low-creeping melon-plants
And the dark cucumber.
He reaps and stows them, drifting, drifting: round him,
Round his green harvest-plot, flow the cool lake-waves,
The mountains ring them."

Nor, perhaps, though the poem is a pretty one, will it stand criticism
of a different kind much better. Such mighty personages as Ulysses and
Circe are scarcely wanted as mere bystanders and "supers" to an
imaginative young gentleman who enumerates, somewhat promiscuously, a
few of the possible visions of the Gods. There is neither classical,
nor romantic, nor logical justification for any such mild effect of
the dread Wine of Circe: and one is driven to the conclusion that the
author chiefly wanted a frame, after his own fashion, for a set of
disconnected vignettes like those of Tennyson's _Palace of Art_
and _Dream of Fair Women_.

But if the title poem is vulnerable, there is plenty of compensation.
The opening sonnet--

"Two lessons, Nature, let me learn of thee"--

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
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