Mr. Arnold's love of nature, and poetic treatment of nature, was to many a vexed soul a great joy and an intense relief. Mr. Arnold was a genuine Wordsworthian--being able to read everything Wordsworth ever wrote except _Vaudracour and Julia_. The influence of Wordsworth upon him was immense, but he was enabled, by the order of his mind, to reject with the heartiest goodwill the cloudy pantheism which robs so much of Wordsworth's best verse of the heightened charm of reality, for, after all, poetry, like religion, must be true, or it is nothing. This strong aversion to the unreal also prevented Mr. Arnold, despite his love of the classical forms, from a nonsensical neo-paganism. His was a manlier attitude. He had no desire to keep tugging at the dry breasts of an outworn creed, nor any disposition to go down on his knees, or _hunkers_ as the Scotch more humorously call them, before plaster casts of Venus, or even of 'Proteus rising from the sea.' There was something very refreshing about this. In the long run even a gloomy truth is better company than a cheerful falsehood. The perpetual strain of living down to a lie, the depressing atmosphere of a circumscribed intelligence tell upon the system, and the cheerful falsehood soon begins to look puffy and dissipated. 'THE YOUTH OF NATURE. 'For, oh! is it you, is it you, Moonlight, and shadow, and lake, And mountains, that fill us with joy, Or the poet who sings you so well? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . More than the singer are these . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yourselves and your fellows ye know not; and me, The mateless, the one, will ye know? Will ye scan me, and read me, and tell Of the thoughts that ferment in my breast, My longing, my sadness, my joy? Will ye claim for your great ones the gift To have rendered the gleam of my skies, To have echoed the moan of my seas, Uttered the voice of my hills? When your great ones depart, will ye say: _All things have suffered a loss, Nature is hid in their grave?_ Race after race, man after man, Have thought that my secret was theirs, Have dream'd that I lived but for them, That they were my glory and joy. They are dust, they are changed, they are gone! I remain.' When a poet is dead we turn to his verse with quickened feelings. He rests from his labours. We still 'Stem across the sea of life by night,' and the voice, once the voice of the living, of one who stood by our side, has for a while an unfamiliar accent, coming to us as it does no longer from our friendly earth but from the strange cold caverns of death.