This conception of the conflict, and especially of the unparalleled complexity, of modern life, is the dominant thought of Arnold. It is the warfare of so many elements that in his eyes distinguishes his own from all previous ages. In former times each civilisation stood by itself, not vitally affected by the puzzling elements of alien civilisations. The modern task is to fuse all together. The actress Rachel is typical, and as in her birth, and life, and death, and in her physical, mental and moral nature, there met and clashed 'Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome,'--so do they meet and clash in the lives of all Arnold offers no solution of the problem. He points out the difficulty, he cherishes an ultimate hopefulness, but none of the answers to the riddle satisfies him. The tone most characteristic of Arnold is in harmony with such fundamental conceptions. It is a tone of refined and thoughtful melancholy. This made him a supreme elegiac poet. _Thyrsis_, the memorial poem on his friend Clough, is generally ranked with the masterpieces in the same type of Tennyson and Shelley and Milton. But _Thyrsis_ does not stand alone. _The Scholar Gipsy_, the _Obermann_ poems, _Rugby Chapel_, _A Southern Night_, and several others of Arnold's finest pieces likewise belong to this class. The elegiac spirit is his special gift, and he shows it in a characteristic way. His poems are not elegiacs for the individual; they are not so even when, as in _Rugby Chapel_ and _A Southern Night_, the subjects are most intimately related in blood to Arnold. He habitually looks beyond the individual to the race, and rather mourns 'the something that infects the world.'