diverts the attention of the reader from the main topic at the end, is
beautifully told. For attaching quality on something like a large
scale I should put this part of _Tristram and Iseult_ much above both
_Sohrab and Rustum_ and _Balder Dead_; but the earlier parts are not
worthy of it, and the whole, like _Empedocles_, is something of a
failure, though both poems afford ample consolation in passages.

The smaller pieces, however, could have saved the volume had their
larger companions been very much weaker. The _Memorial Verses_ on
Wordsworth (published first in _Fraser_) have taken their place once
for all. If they have not the poetical beauty in different ways of
Carew on Donne, of Dryden on Oldham, even of Tickell upon Addison, of
_Adonais_ above all, of Wordsworth's own beautiful _Effusion_ on the
group of dead poets in 1834, they do not fall far short even in this
respect. And for adequacy of meaning, not unpoetically expressed, they
are almost supreme. If Mr Arnold's own unlucky and maimed definition
of poetry as "a criticism of life" had been true, they would be poetry
in quintessence; and, as it is, they are poetry.

Far more so is the glorious _Summer Night_, which came near the middle
of the book. There is a cheering doctrine of mystical optimism which
will have it that a sufficiently intense devotion to any ideal never
fails of at least one moment of consummate realisation and enjoyment.
Such a moment was granted to Matthew Arnold when he wrote _A Summer
Night_. Whether that rather vague life-philosophy of his, that
erection of a melancholy agnosticism _plus_ asceticism into a creed,
was anything more than a not ungraceful or undignified will-worship of
Pride, we need not here argue out. But we have seen how faithfully the
note of it rings through the verse of these years. And here it rings
not only faithfully, but almost triumphantly. The lips are touched at