In one of his own most charming critical essays he contrasts the poetry of Homer, which consists of "natural thoughts in natural words," with the poetry of Tennyson, which consists of "distilled thoughts in distilled words." "Distilled" is one of the happiest words to be found in poetical criticism, and may be used with equal aptitude in the criticism of life. To most people the waters of life come with all their natural qualities--sweet or bitter--undistilled. Only the ordinary conditions of civilization, common to all, flavoured the waters of life to Shakespeare, to Cervantes, to Burns, to Scott, to Dumas, and those other great creators whose minds were mirrors--broad and clear--for reflecting the rich drama of life around them. To Arnold the waters of life came distilled so carefully that the wonder is that he had any originality left. A member of the upper stratum of that "middle class" which he despised, or pretended to despise--the eldest son of one of the most accomplished as well as one of the most noble-tempered men of his time--Arnold from the moment of his birth drank the finest distilled waters that can be drunk even in these days. Perhaps, on the whole, the surprising thing is how little he suffered thereby. Indeed those who had formed an idea of Arnold's personality from their knowledge of his "culture," and especially those who had been delighted by the fastidious and feminine delicacy of his prose style, used to be quite bewildered when for the first time they met him at a dinner-table or in a friend's smoking-room. His prose was so self-conscious that what people expected to find in the writer was the Arnold as he was conceived by certain "young lions" of journalism whom he satirized--a somewhat over-cultured _petit-maitre_--almost, indeed, a coxcomb of letters. On the other hand, those who had been captured by his poetry expected to find a man whose sensitive organism responded nervously to every uttered word as an aeolian harp answers to the faintest breeze. What they found was a broad-shouldered, manly--almost burly--Englishman with a fine countenance, bronzed by the open air of England, wrinkled apparently by the sun, wind-worn as an English skipper's, open and frank as a fox-hunting squire's--and yet a countenance whose finely chiselled features were as high-bred and as commanding as Wellington's or Sir Charles Napier's. The voice they heard was deep-toned, fearless, rich and frank, and yet modulated to express every _nuance_ of thought, every movement of emotion and humour. In his prose essays the humour he showed was of a somewhat thin-lipped kind; in his more important poems he showed none at all. It was here, in this matter of humour, that Arnold's writings were specially misleading as to the personality of the man. Judged from his poems, it was not with a poet like the writer of "The Northern Farmer," or a poet like the writer of "Ned Bratts," that any student of poetry would have dreamed of classing him.