Between my father and his elder brother Matthew Arnold there was barely
a year's difference of age. The elder was born in December, 1822, and
the younger in November, 1823. They were always warmly attached to each
other, and in spite of much that was outwardly divergent--sharply
divergent--they were more alike fundamentally than was often suspected.
Both had derived from some remoter ancestry--possibly through their
Cornish mother, herself the daughter of a Penrose and a
Trevenen--elements and qualities which were lacking in the strong
personality of their father. Imagination, "rebellion against fact,"
spirituality, a tendency to dream, unworldliness, the passionate love of
beauty and charm, "ineffectualness" in the practical competitive
life--these, according to Matthew Arnold, when he came to lecture at
Oxford on "The Study of Celtic Literature," were and are the
characteristic marks of the Celt. They were unequally distributed
between the two brothers. "Unworldliness," "rebellion against fact,"
"ineffectualness" in common life, fell rather to my father's share than
my uncle's; though my uncle's "worldliness," of which he was sometimes
accused, if it ever existed, was never more than skin-deep. Imagination
in my father led to a lifelong and mystical preoccupation with religion;
it made Matthew Arnold one of the great poets of the nineteenth century.

There is a sketch of my father made in 1847, which preserves the dreamy,
sensitive look of early youth, when he was the center of a band of
remarkable friends--Clough, Stanley, F.T. Palgrave, Alfred Domett
(Browning's Waring), and others. It is the face--nobly and delicately
cut--of one to whom the successes of the practical, competitive life
could never be of the same importance as those events which take place
in thought, and for certain minds are the only real events. "For ages
and ages the world has been constantly slipping ever more and more out