the famous pedant, "put away" Mr Arnold "fully conjugated in his
desk." The poem is in theme and scheme purely Romantic, and
"nineteenth century" in its looking back to a simple and pathetic
story of the Middle Age--love, bereavement, and pious resignation. It
is divided into three parts. The first, in trochaic ballad metre,
telling the story, is one of the poet's weakest things. You may oft
see as good in Helen Maria Williams and the Delia Cruscans. The
second, describing the church where the duke and duchess sleep, in an
eight-line stanza of good fashion, is satisfactory but nothing more.
And then the third, after a manner hardly paralleled save in Crashaw's
_Flaming Heart_, breaks from twaddle and respectable verse into a
rocket-rush of heroic couplets, scattering star-showers of poetry all
over and round the bewildered reader. It is artifice rather than art,
perhaps, to lisp and drawl, that, when you _do_ speak out, your
speech may be the more effective. But hardly anything can make one
quarrel with such a piece of poetry as that beginning--

"So rest, for ever rest, O princely pair!"

and ending--

"The rustle of the eternal rain of Love."

On the other hand, in _Requiescat_ there is not a false note,
unless it be the dubious word "vasty" in the last line; and even that
may shelter itself under the royal mantle of Shakespeare. The poet has
here achieved what he too often fails in, the triple union of
simplicity, pathos, and (in the best sense) elegance. The dangerous
repetitions of "roses, roses," "tired, tired," &c., come all right;
and above all he has the flexibility and quiver of metre that he too