Arnold was a student of Wordsworth, and was among the most discriminating admirers of that great poet. One of the best of the critical essays is devoted to him; and the finest selection ever made from the poetry of Wordsworth was made by Arnold. The skill of that selection proves that Arnold was capable of benefiting from Wordsworth without being tempted to follow him where his guidance would have been dangerous. He admired Wordsworth's calm, he admired him for his power to 'possess his soul,' he admired him as a student of nature. The calm and rest in himself were with Arnold rather an aspiration than a thing attained: it was part of his creed that in these latter days such calm was unattainable. But he followed Wordsworth as a student of nature. The love of nature was with Arnold an inborn passion, the strength of which is proved not only by his poetry, but in one sense even more convincingly by his familiar letters. Wordsworth gave him a point of view and strengthened his power of vision. But Arnold writes his nature-poetry for a new age under new conditions. The very fact that the calm of Wordsworth is unattainable imparts to his verse a subdued tone. He stands between Wordsworth and his other favourite Senancour, sharing the spiritual force of the one and the reflective melancholy of the other. Arnold's best descriptions are tinged with this melancholy. The 'infinite desire of all which might have been' inspires _Resignation_, one of the poems of his earliest volume. We see it again in the lovely closing lines of _The Church of Brou_. It determines Arnold's preference for pale colours, soft lights and subdued sounds, for moonlight effects, and for the hum of 'brooding mountain bee.' In the beautiful _Dover Beach_ it is associated with his sense of the decay of faith. Even in the lyric rapture of the description of the sea-caverns in _The Forsaken Merman_, the melancholy is still present. To many it is oppressive, and perhaps it is the absence of it from the song of Callicles in _Empedocles on Etna_ that has caused some sympathetic critics to pronounce that the finest of all Arnold's poems. Arnold's longer pieces fall into two classes: the dramatic, including _Merope_ and _Empedocles on Etna_; and the narrative, best represented by _Sohrab and Rustum_ and _Balder Dead_, for _Tristram and Iseult_ is as much lyrical as narrative. As a dramatist Arnold was not successful. His _Merope_, a play on the Greek model, is frigid; and fine as is _Empedocles on Etna_, its merits are in the thought and the beautiful verse rather than the dramatic structure. The truth is that Arnold had neither the eye for fine shades of character nor the interest in action essential to the drama. His treatment of character has already been commented upon in connexion with his prose. With regard to action, Arnold himself withdrew _Empedocles on Etna_ shortly after its publication, on the ground that it was a poem in which all was to be endured and nothing to be done.