and much labour were needed to build another roof of new materials--a period when it was impossible for the poet to enjoy either the quietism of High Church Pantheism in which Wordsworth had basked, or the sheltering protection of German metaphysics under which Coleridge had preached--a period, nevertheless, when the wonderful revelations of science were still too raw, too cold and hard, to satisfy the yearnings of the poetic soul. Objectionable as Arnold's rationalizing criticism was to contemporary orthodoxy, and questionable as was his equipment in point of theological learning, his spirituality of outlook and ethical purpose were not to be denied. Yet it is not Arnold's views that have become current coin so much as his literary phrases--his craving for "culture" and "sweetness and light," his contempt for "the dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion," his "stream of tendency not ourselves making for righteousness," his classification of "Philistines and barbarians"--and so forth. His death at Liverpool, of heart failure on the 15th of April 1888, was sudden and quite unexpected. Arnold was a prominent figure in that great galaxy of Victorian poets who were working simultaneously--Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, William Morris and Swinburne--poets between whom there was at least this connecting link, that the quest of all of them was the old-fashioned poetical quest of the beautiful. Beauty was their watchword, as it had been the watchword of their immediate predecessors--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron. That this group of early 19th-century poets might be divided into two--those whose primary quest was physical beauty, and those whose primary quest was moral beauty-is no doubt true. Still, in so far as beauty was their quest they were all akin. And so with the Victorian group to which Arnold belonged. As to the position which he takes among them opinions must necessarily vary. On the whole, his place in the group will be below all the others. The question as to whether he was primarily a poet or a _prosateur_ has been often asked. If we were to try to answer that question here, we should have to examine his poetry in detail--we should have to inquire whether his primary impulse of expression was to seize upon the innate suggestive power of words, or whether his primary impulse was to rely upon the logical power of the sentence. In nobility of temper, in clearness of statement, and especially in descriptive power, he is beyond praise. But intellect, judgment, culture and study of great poets may do much towards enabling a prose-writer to write what must needs be called good poetry. What they cannot enable him to do is to produce those magical effects which poets of the rarer kind can achieve by seizing that mysterious, suggestive power of words which is far beyond all mere statement. Notwithstanding the exquisite work that Arnold has