metrical form, and they cannot strike out a new one for themselves. In
this piece the author--most attractively to the critic, if not always
quite satisfactorily to the reader--makes for, and flits about,
half-a-dozen different forms of verse. Now it is the equivalenced
octosyllable of the Coleridgean stamp rather than of Scott's or
Byron's; now trochaic decasyllabics of a rather rococo kind; and once
at least a splendid anapæstic couplet, which catches the ear and
clings to the memory for a lifetime--

"What voices are these on the clear night air?
What lights in the court? What steps on the stair?"

But the most interesting experiment by far is in the rhymed heroic,
which appears fragmentarily in the first two parts and substantively
in the third. The interest of this, which (one cannot but regret it)
Mr Arnold did not carry further, relapsing on a stiff if stately blank
verse, is not merely intrinsic, but both retrospective and
prospective. It is not the ordinary "stopped" eighteenth-century
couplet at all; nor the earlier one of Drayton and Daniel. It is the
"enjambed," very mobile, and in the right hands admirably fluent and
adaptable couplet, which William Browne and Chamberlayne practised in
the early and middle seventeenth century, which Leigh Hunt revived and
taught to Keats, and of which, later than Mr Arnold himself, Mr
William Morris was such an admirable practitioner. Its use here is
decidedly happy; and the whole of this part shows in Mr Arnold a
temporary Romantic impulse, which again we cannot but regret that he
did not obey. The picture-work of the earlier lines is the best he
ever did. The figure of Iseult with the White Hands stands out with
the right Præ-Raphaelite distinctness and charm; and the story of
Merlin and Vivian, with which, in the manner so dear to him, he