Far more so is the glorious _Summer Night_, which came near the middle of the book. There is a cheering doctrine of mystical optimism which will have it that a sufficiently intense devotion to any ideal never fails of at least one moment of consummate realisation and enjoyment. Such a moment was granted to Matthew Arnold when he wrote _A Summer Night_. Whether that rather vague life-philosophy of his, that erection of a melancholy agnosticism _plus_ asceticism into a creed, was anything more than a not ungraceful or undignified will-worship of Pride, we need not here argue out. But we have seen how faithfully the note of it rings through the verse of these years. And here it rings not only faithfully, but almost triumphantly. The lips are touched at last: the eyes are thoroughly opened to see what the lips shall speak: the brain almost unconsciously frames and fills the adequate and inevitable scheme. And, as always at these right poetic moments, the minor felicities follow the major. The false rhymes are nowhere; the imperfect phrases, the little sham simplicities or pedantries, hide themselves; and the poet is free, from the splendid opening landscape through the meditative exposition, and the fine picture of the shipwreck, to the magnificent final invocation of the "Clearness divine!" His freedom, save once, is not so unquestionably exhibited in the remarkable group of poems--the future constituents of the _Switzerland_ group, but still not classified under any special head--which in the original volume chiefly follow _Empedocles_, with the batch later called "Faded Leaves" to introduce them. It is, perhaps, if such things were worth attempting at all, an argument for supposing some real undercurrent of fact or feeling in them, that they are not grouped at their first appearance, and that some of them are perhaps designedly separated from the rest. Even the name "Marguerite" does not appear in _A Farewell_; though nobody who marked as well as read, could fail to connect it with the _To my Friends_ of the former volume. We are to suppose, it would appear, that the twelvemonth has passed, and that Marguerite's anticipation of the renewed kiss is fulfilled in the first stanzas. But the lover's anticipation, too, is fulfilled, though as usual not quite as he made it; he wearies of his restless and yet unmasterful passion; he rather muses and morals in his usual key on the "way of a man with a maid" than complains or repines. And then we go off for a time from Marguerite, though not exactly from Switzerland, in the famous "_Obermann_" stanzas, a variation of the Wordsworth memorial lines, melodious, but a very little _impotent_--the English utterance of what Sainte-Beuve, I think, called "the discouraged generation of 1850." Now mere discouragement, except as a passing mood, though extremely natural, is also a little contemptible--pessimism-and-water, mere peevishness to the "fierce indignation," mere whining compared with the great ironic