but still with music and truth in _Strangers Yet_--here receives
almost its final poetical expression. The image--the islands in the
sea--is capitally projected in the first stanza; it is exquisitely
amplified in the second; the moral comes with due force in the third;
and the whole winds up with one of the great poetic phrases of the
century--one of the "jewels five [literally five!] words long" of
English verse--a phrase complete and final, with epithets in unerring
cumulation--

"The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea."

_Human Life_, no ill thing in itself, reads a little weakly after
_Isolation_; but _Despondency_ is a pretty piece of melancholy, and,
with a comfortable stool, will suit a man well. In the sonnet, _When I
shall be divorced_, Mr Arnold tried the Elizabethan vein with less
success than in his Shakespeare piece; and _Self-Deception_ and _Lines
written by a Death-Bed_, with some beauty have more monotony. The
closing lines of the last are at the same time the moral of the book
and the formula of the Arnoldian "note"--

"Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.
'Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
But 'tis not what our youth desires."

Again, we remember some one's parody-remonstrance thirty years later,
and again we may think that the condemnation which Mr Arnold himself
was soon to pronounce upon _Empedocles_ is rather disastrously
far-reaching, while even this phrase is a boomerang. Musical and
philosophical despair is one of the innumerable strings of the poetic
lyre; but 'tis not what our youth, or our age either, desires for a