on regardless of these human woes, to where the stars

"Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea."

Even here, it is true, the Devil's Advocate may ask whether this, like
the _Mycerinus_ close, that of _Empedocles_, and others,
especially one famous thing, to which we shall come presently, is not
more of a purple tail-patch, a "tag," a "curtain," than of a
legitimate and integral finale. It is certain that Mr Arnold,
following the Greeks in intention no doubt, if not quite so closely as
he intended, was very fond of these "curtains"--these little
rhetorical reconciliations and soothings for the reader. But this is
the most in place of any of them, and certainly the noblest
_tirade_ that its author has left.

Most of the new poems here are at a level but a little lower than this
part of _Sohrab and Rustum_, while some of them are even above it
as wholes. _Philomela_ is beautiful, in spite of the obstinate
will-worship of its unrhymed Pindaric: the _Stanzas to the Memory of
Edward Quillinan_ are really pathetic, though slightly irritating
in their "sweet simplicity"; and if _Thekla's Answer_ is nothing
particular, _The Neckan_ nothing but a weaker doublet of the
_Merman, A Dream_ is noteworthy in itself, and as an outlier of
the _Marguerite_ group. Then we have three things, of which the
first is, though unequal, great at the close, while the other two rank
with the greatest things Mr Arnold ever did. These are _The Church
of Brou_, _Requiescat_, and _The Scholar-Gipsy_.

If, as no critic ever can, the critic could thoroughly discover the
secret of the inequality of _The Church of Brou_, he might, like