The Spasmodics were forgotten, the Tupper cult had been nearly (not
yet quite) laughed out of existence. That Mr Arnold's own poems had
had any widely extended sale or reading could hardly be said; but they
were read by those who were or were shortly to be themselves read. You
had not to look far in any Oxford college (I cannot speak of
Cambridge) before you found them on those undergraduate shelves which
mean so much; while many who, from general distaste to poetry or from
accident, knew them not, or hardly knew them, were familiar with their
author's prose work, or at least knew him as one whom others knew.

The volume itself was well calculated to take advantage, to at least a
moderate extent, of this conjunction of circumstance. At no time was
the appeal of Mr Arnold's poetry of the most impetuous or peremptory
order. And it might be contended that this collection contains nothing
quite up to the very best things of the earlier poems, to the
_Shakespeare_ sonnet, to _The Scholar-Gipsy_, to the _Isolation_
stanzas. But with the majority of its readers it was sure rather to
send them to these earlier things than to remind them thereof, and its
own attractions were abundant, various, and strong.

In the poet himself there was perhaps a slight consciousness of "the
silver age." The prefatory _Stanzas_, a title changed in the
collected works to _Persistency of Poetry_, sound this note--

"Though the Muse be gone away,
Though she move not earth to-day,
Souls, erewhile who caught her word,
Ah! still harp on what they heard."

A confession perhaps a little dangerous, when the Muses were speaking