It is curious how the public is beginning to take my poems to its
bosom after long years of comparative neglect. The wave of thought
and change has rolled on until people begin to find a significance
and an attraction in what had none for them formerly.

But he had put it himself in poetry long before--this slow emergence
above the tumult and the shouting of the stars that are to shine upon
the next generation. Mr. Garnett, in the careful and learned notice of
my uncle's life and work in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, says
of his poetry that "most of it" is "immortal." This, indeed, is the
great, the mystic word that rings in every poet's ear from the
beginning. And there is scarcely any true poet who is not certain that
sooner or later his work will "put on immortality." Matthew Arnold
expressed, I think, his own secret faith, in the beautiful lines of his
early poem, "The Bacchanalia--or the New Age":

The epoch ends, the world is still.
The age has talk'd and work'd its fill--

* * * * *

And in the after-silence sweet,
Now strife is hush'd, our ears doth meet,
Ascending pure, the bell-like fame
Of this or that down-trodden name,
Delicate spirits, push'd away
In the hot press of the noonday.
And o'er the plain, where the dead age
Did its now silent warfare wage--