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--