'Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave, Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. Love lends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave. 'Dreams dawn and fly, friends smile and die Like spring flowers; Our vaunted life is one long funeral. Men dig graves with bitter tears For their dead hopes; and all, Mazed with doubts and sick with fears, Count the hours. 'We count the hours! These dreams of ours, False and hollow, Do we go hence and find they are not dead? Joys we dimly apprehend, Faces that smiled and fled, Hopes born here, and born to end, Shall we follow?' In a poem like this Mr. Arnold is seen at his best; he fairly forces himself into the very front ranks. In form almost equal to Shelley, or at any rate not so very far behind him, whilst of course in reality, in wholesome thought, in the pleasures that are afforded by thinking, it is of incomparable excellence. We die as we do, not as we would. Yet on reading again Mr. Arnold's _Wish_, we feel that the manner of his death was much to his mind. 'A WISH. 'I ask not that my bed of death From bands of greedy heirs be free: For these besiege the latest breath Of fortune's favoured sons, not me. 'I ask not each kind soul to keep Tearless, when of my death he hears. Let those who will, if any--weep! There are worse plagues on earth than tears. 'I ask but that my death may find The freedom to my life denied; Ask but the folly of mankind Then--then at last to quit my side. 'Spare me the whispering, crowded room, The friends who come, and gape, and go; The ceremonious air of gloom-- All, which makes death a hideous show! 'Nor bring to see me cease to live Some doctor full of phrase and fame To shake his sapient head and give The ill he cannot cure a name. 'Nor fetch to take the accustom'd toll Of the poor sinner bound for death His brother-doctor of the soul To canvass with official breath 'The future and its viewless things-- That undiscover'd mystery Which one who feels death's winnowing wings Must needs read clearer, sure, than he! 'Bring none of these; but let me be While all around in silence lies, Moved to the window near, and see Once more before my dying eyes, 'Bathed in the sacred dews of morn The wide aerial landscape spread-- The world which was ere I was born, The world which lasts when I am dead. 'Which never was the friend of _one_, Nor promised love it could not give, But lit for all its generous sun And lived itself and made us live.