most amiable and reasonable of that sex for refusing to attend to her
at the minute when she wants _you_, by devoting even hours, even days,
when you are at leisure for _her_. To put the thing more seriously,
though perhaps not more truly, the human brain is not so constituted
that you can ride or drive or "train" from school to school, examining
as you go, for half-a-dozen or half-a-score hours a-day, or that you
can devote the same time to the weariest and dreariest of all
businesses, the reading of hundreds of all but identical answers to
the same stock questions, and yet be fresh and fertile for imaginative
composition. The nearest contradictory instances to this proposition
are those of Scott and Southey, and they are, in more ways than one or
two, very damaging instances--exceptions which, in a rather horrible
manner, do prove the rule. To less harassing, and especially less
peremptory, work than Mr Arnold's, as well as far more literary in
kind, Scott sacrificed the minor literary graces, Southey immolated
the choicer fruits of genius which he undoubtedly possessed the power
of producing; and both "died from the top downward."

But there was something more than this. Mr Arnold's poetic ambition,
as we have seen, did not aim at very long and elaborate works. His
forte was the occasional piece--which might still suggest itself and
be completed--which, as we shall see, did sometimes suggest itself and
was completed--in the intervals, the holidays, the relaxations of his
task. And if these lucid and lucent intervals, though existent, were
so rare, their existence and their rarity together suggest that
something more than untoward circumstance is to blame for the fact
that they did not show themselves oftener. A full and constant tide of
inspiration is imperative; it will not be denied; it may kill the poet
if he cannot or will not give vent to it, but it will not be patient
of repression--quietly content to appear now and then, even on such