Matthew Arnold by George Saintsbury
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page 15 of 197 (07%)
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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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