"When the first _rose_ flush was steeping
All the frore peak's _awful_ crown"--

are but an unconscious reminiscence of the great ones--

"And on the glimmering summit far withdrawn,
God made himself an _awful rose_ of dawn."

He kept this level, though here following not Tennyson or Keats but
Shelley, in the three ambitious and elaborate lyrics, _The Voice_, _To
Fausta_, and _Stagirius_, fine things, if somehow a little suggestive
of inability on their author's part fully to meet the demands of the
forms he attempts--"the note," in short, expressed practically as well
as in theory. _Stagirius_ in particular wants but a very little to be
a perfect expression of the obstinate questionings of the century; and
yet wanting a little, it wants so much! Others, _To a Gipsy Child_ and
_The Hayswater Boat_ (Mr Arnold never reprinted this), are but faint
Wordsworthian echoes; and thus we come to _The Forsaken Merman_.

It is, I believe, not so "correct" as it once was to admire this; but
I confess indocility to correctness, at least the correctness which
varies with fashion. _The Forsaken Merman_ is not a perfect poem--it
has _longueurs_, though it is not long; it has those inadequacies,
those incompetences of expression, which are so oddly characteristic
of its author; and his elaborate simplicity, though more at home here
than in some other places, occasionally gives a dissonance. But it is
a great poem--one by itself, one which finds and keeps its own place
in the foreordained gallery or museum, with which every true lover of
poetry is provided, though he inherits it by degrees. No one, I
suppose, will deny its pathos; I should be sorry for any one who fails