for its exclusion (save in very small part) from that volume tells the
whole truth. At any rate, I think most good judges quarrel with
_Empedodes_, not because the situation is unmanageable, but because
the poet has not managed it. The contrast, in dramatic trio, of the
world-worn and disappointed philosopher, the practical and rather
prosaic physician, and the fresh gifts and unspoilt gusto of the
youthful poet, is neither impossible nor unpromising. Perhaps, as a
situation, it is a little nearer than Mr Arnold quite knew to that of
_Paracelsus_, and it is handled with less force, if with more
clearness, than Browning's piece. But one does not know what is more
amiss with it than is amiss with most of its author's longer
pieces--namely, that neither story nor character-drawing was his
_forte_, that the dialogue is too colourless, and that though the
description is often charming, it is seldom masterly. As before, there
are jarring rhymes--"school" and "oracle," "Faun" and "scorn."
Empedocles himself is sometimes dreadfully tedious; but the part of
Callicles throughout is lavishly poetical. Not merely the show
passages--that which the Roman father,

"Though young, intolerably severe,"

saved from banishment and retained by itself in the 1853 volume, as
_Cadmus and Harmonia_, and the beautiful lyrical close,--but the
picture of the highest wooded glen on Etna, and the Flaying of
Marsyas, are delightful things.

_Tristram and Iseult_, with fewer good patches, has a greater
technical interest. It is only one, but it is the most remarkable, of
the places where we perceive in Mr Arnold one of the most curious of
the notes of transition-poets. They will not frankly follow another's