despair. As for _Consolation_, which in form as in matter strongly resembles part of the _Strayed Reveller_, I must say, at the risk of the charge of Philistinism, that I cannot see why most of it should not have been printed as prose. In fact, it would be a very bold and astonishingly ingenious person who, not knowing the original, perceived any verse-division in this-- "The bleak, stern hour, whose severe moments I would annihilate, is passed by others in warmth, light, joy." Nor perhaps can very much be said for some of the other things. The sonnet afterwards entitled _The World's Triumphs_ is not strong; _The Second Best_ is but "a chain of extremely valuable thoughts"; _Revolution_ a conceit. _The Youth of Nature_ and _The Youth of Man_ do but take up less musically the _threnos_ for Wordsworth. But _Morality_ is both rhyme and poetry; _Progress_ is at least rhyme; and _The Future_, though rhymeless again, is the best of all Mr Arnold's waywardnesses of this kind. It is, however, in the earlier division of the smaller poems--those which come between _Empedocles_ and _Tristram_--that the interest is most concentrated, and that the best thing--better as far as its subject is concerned even than the _Summer Night_--appears. For though all does _not_ depend upon the subject, yet of two poems equally good in other ways, that which has the better subject will be the better. Here we have the bulk of the "Marguerite" or _Switzerland_ poems--in other words, we leave the windy vagaries of mental indigestion and come to the real things--Life and Love. _The River_ does not name any one, though the "arch eyes" identify Marguerite; and _Excuse_, _Indifference_, and _Too Late_ are obviously of the company. But none of these is exactly of the first class. We grow warmer with _On the Rhine_, containing, among other things, the good distich-- "Eyes too expressive to lie blue, Too lovely to be grey"; on which Mr Swinburne gave a probably unconscious _scholion_ as well as variation in his own-- "Those eyes, the greenest of things blue, The bluest of things grey." The intense pathos, which the poet could rarely "let himself go" sufficiently to reach, together with the seventeenth-century touch which in English not unfrequently rewards the self-sacrifice necessary to scholarly poets in such abandonment, appears in _Longing_; _The Lake_ takes up the faint thread of story gracefully enough; and _Parting_ does the same with more importance in a combination, sometimes very effective, of iambic couplets and anapaestic strophes, and with a touch of direct if not exalted nature in its revelation of that terrible thing, retrospective jealousy, in the lover. Woe to the man who allows himself to think-- "To the lips! ah! of others Those lips have been pressed, And others, ere I was, Were clasped to that breast,"