A detailed examination of his poetic performance has been attempted in the earlier pages of this little book, as well as some general remarks upon it; but we may well find room here for something more general still. That the poet is as much above the prose-writer in rank as he is admittedly of an older creation, has always been held; and here, as elsewhere, I am not careful to attempt innovation. In fact, though it may seem unkind to say so, it may be suspected that nobody has ever tried to elevate the function of the prose-writer above that of the poet, unless he thought he could write great prose and knew he could not write great poetry. But in another order of estimate than this, Mr Arnold's poetic work may seem of greater value than his prose, always admirable and sometimes consummate as the latter is, if we take each at its best. At its best--and this is how, though he would himself seem to have sometimes felt inclined to dispute the fact, we must reckon a poet. His is not poetry of the absolutely trustworthy kind. It is not like that of Shelley or of Keats, who, when their period of mere juvenility is past, simply cannot help writing poetry; nor is it, on the other hand, like that of Wordsworth, who flies and flounders with an incalculable and apparently irresponsible alternation. It is rather--though I should rank it far higher, on all but the historic estimate, than Gray's--like that of Gray. The poet has in him a vein, or, if the metaphor be preferred, a spring, of the most real and rarest poetry. But the vein is constantly broken by faults, and never very thick; the spring is intermittent, and runs at times by drops only. There is always, as it were, an effort to get it to yield freely, to run clear and constant. And--again as in the case of Gray--the poet subjects himself to a further disability by all manner of artificial restrictions, struggles to comply with this or that system, theories, formulas, tricks. He will not "indulge his genius." And so it is but rarely that we get things like the _Scholar-Gipsy_, like the _Forsaken Merman_, like the second _Isolation_; and when we do get such things there is sometimes, as in the case of the peroration to _Sohrab and Rustum_, and perhaps the splendid opening of _Westminster Abbey_ and _Thyrsis_, a certain sense of parade, of the elaborate assumption of the singing-robe. There is too seldom the sensation which Coleridge unconsciously suggested in the poem that heralded the poetry of the nineteenth century. We do not feel that "The fair breeze blew, the while foam flew, The furrow followed free"-- that "We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea;" but that a mighty launch of elaborate preparation is taking place, that we are pleased and orderly spectators standing round, and that the ship is gliding in due manner, but with no rush or burst, into the sea of poetry. While elsewhere there may be even the sense of effort and preparation without the success.