One may perhaps not impertinently doubt whether the critical reason, _v. infra_--in itself a just and penetrating one, as well as admirably expressed--which, in the Preface of the 1853 collection, the poet gave for its exclusion (save in very small part) from that volume tells the whole truth. At any rate, I think most good judges quarrel with _Empedodes_, not because the situation is unmanageable, but because the poet has not managed it. The contrast, in dramatic trio, of the world-worn and disappointed philosopher, the practical and rather prosaic physician, and the fresh gifts and unspoilt gusto of the youthful poet, is neither impossible nor unpromising. Perhaps, as a situation, it is a little nearer than Mr Arnold quite knew to that of _Paracelsus_, and it is handled with less force, if with more clearness, than Browning's piece. But one does not know what is more amiss with it than is amiss with most of its author's longer pieces--namely, that neither story nor character-drawing was his _forte_, that the dialogue is too colourless, and that though the description is often charming, it is seldom masterly. As before, there are jarring rhymes--"school" and "oracle," "Faun" and "scorn." Empedocles himself is sometimes dreadfully tedious; but the part of Callicles throughout is lavishly poetical. Not merely the show passages--that which the Roman father, "Though young, intolerably severe," saved from banishment and retained by itself in the 1853 volume, as _Cadmus and Harmonia_, and the beautiful lyrical close,--but the picture of the highest wooded glen on Etna, and the Flaying of Marsyas, are delightful things. _Tristram and Iseult_, with fewer good patches, has a greater technical interest. It is only one, but it is the most remarkable, of the places where we perceive in Mr Arnold one of the most curious of the notes of transition-poets. They will not frankly follow another's metrical form, and they cannot strike out a new one for themselves. In this piece the author--most attractively to the critic, if not always quite satisfactorily to the reader--makes for, and flits about, half-a-dozen different forms of verse. Now it is the equivalenced octosyllable of the Coleridgean stamp rather than of Scott's or Byron's; now trochaic decasyllabics of a rather rococo kind; and once at least a splendid anapaestic couplet, which catches the ear and clings to the memory for a lifetime-- "What voices are these on the clear night air? What lights in the court? What steps on the stair?"