In political discussion as in all other forms of criticism Arnold aimed at disinterestedness. "I am a Liberal," he says in the Introduction to _Culture and Anarchy_, "yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and self-renouncement." In the last condition he believed that his particular strength lay. "I do not wish to see men of culture entrusted with power." In his coolness and freedom from bitterness is to be found his chief superiority to his more violent contemporaries. This saved him from magnifying the faults inseparable from the social movements of his day. In contrast with Carlyle he retains to the end a sympathy with the advance of democracy and a belief in the principles of liberty and equality, while not blinded to the weaknesses of Liberalism. Political discussion in the hands of its express partisans is always likely to become violent and one-sided. This violence and one-sidedness Arnold believes it the work of criticism to temper, or as he expresses it, in _Culture and Anarchy_, "Culture is the eternal opponent of the two things which are the signal marks of Jacobinism,--its fierceness and its addiction to an abstract system." VII [Sidenote: Conclusion] "Un Milton jeune et voyageant" was George Sand's description of the young Arnold. The eager pursuit of high aims, implied in this description, he carried from youth into manhood and age. The innocence, the hopefulness, and the noble curiosity of youth he retained to the end. But these became tempered with the ripe wisdom of maturity, a wisdom needed for the helpful interpretation of a perplexing period. His prose writings are surpassed, in that spontaneous and unaccountable inspiration which we call genius, by those of certain of his contemporaries, but when we become exhausted by the perversities of ill-controlled passion and find ourselves unable to breathe the rarified air of transcendentalism, we may turn to him for the clarifying and strengthening effect of calm intelligence and pure spirituality. [Footnote 1: From _Dr. Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish Church, Macmillan's Magazine_, February, 1863, vol. 7, p. 336.] ~BIBLIOGRAPHY~ ARNOLD'S POEMS. 1849. _The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems_. 1852. ~Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems~. 1853. _Poems_. 1855. _Poems_ (Second Series). 1858. _Merope_. 1867. _New Poems_. 1869. _Poems_ (First Collected Edition). (A few new poems were added in the later collections of 1877, 1881, 1885, and 1890.) ARNOLD'S PROSE.