and who does not at once exorcise the demon with the fortunately all-potent spell of _Bocca bacciata_, and the rest! _Absence_ and _Destiny_ show him in the same Purgatory; and it is impossible to say that he has actually escaped in the crowning poem of the series--the crowning-point perhaps of his poetry, the piece beginning "Yes! in the sea of life enisled." It is neither uninteresting nor unimportant that this exquisite piece, by a man's admiration of which (for there are some not wholly lost, who do _not_ admire it) his soundness in the Catholic Faith of poetry may be tested, perhaps as well as by any other, has borne more than one or two titles, It is in the 1852 volume, _To Marguerite. In returning a volume of the letters of Ortis_. In 1853 it became _Isolation_, its best name; and later it took the much less satisfactory one of _To Marguerite--continued_, being annexed to another. _Isolation_ is preferable for many reasons; not least because the actual Marguerite appears nowhere in the poem, and, except in the opening monosyllable, can hardly be said to be even rhetorically addressed. The poet's affection--it is scarcely passion--is there, but in transcendence: he meditates more than he feels. And that function of the riddle of the painful earth which Lucretius, thousands of years ago, put in his grim _Nequicquam!_ which one of Mr Arnold's own contemporaries formulated with less magnificence and more popularity, but still with music and truth in _Strangers Yet_--here receives almost its final poetical expression. The image--the islands in the sea--is capitally projected in the first stanza; it is exquisitely amplified in the second; the moral comes with due force in the third; and the whole winds up with one of the great poetic phrases of the century--one of the "jewels five [literally five!] words long" of English verse--a phrase complete and final, with epithets in unerring cumulation-- "The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea." _Human Life_, no ill thing in itself, reads a little weakly after _Isolation_; but _Despondency_ is a pretty piece of melancholy, and, with a comfortable stool, will suit a man well. In the sonnet, _When I shall be divorced_, Mr Arnold tried the Elizabethan vein with less success than in his Shakespeare piece; and _Self-Deception_ and _Lines written by a Death-Bed_, with some beauty have more monotony. The closing lines of the last are at the same time the moral of the book and the formula of the Arnoldian "note"-- "Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well. 'Tis all perhaps which man acquires, But 'tis not what our youth desires."