As a poet, Matthew Arnold had been known among us for a decade or more of years, and, though not celebrated with the wide popularity of Tennyson, had been as cordially cherished as the Laureate himself by all who valued in poetry the indications of profound intellectual experience as well as the singer's native gift. Those who are most familiar with the verses of the Oxford Professor will be least surprised with the critical insight and judicial wisdom of these Essays. For, independently of any question of natural affinity or natural incompatibility between the functions of bard and critic, there is that in Mr. Arnold's poetry which makes the fortune of the essayist,--an intense subjectiveness united to an analytic subtilty, which would mar the beauty of his verse, as it certainly does that of Mr. Browning, were it not compensated by a depth and truth of poetic feeling, in which Arnold far excels Browning, and has no superior among recent English poets. Some of his poems are critical essays, without losing the distinctive character of poetry; and some of his best criticisms are done in verse. What better, for example, than the sentence on Byron in "Memorial Verses"? "He taught us little: but our soul Had felt him like the thunder's roll. With shivering heart the strife we saw Of Passion with Eternal Law; And yet with reverential awe We watched the fount of fiery life Which served for that Titanic strife." Or that on Goethe in "Obermann"? "For he pursued a lonely road, His eye on Nature's plan,-- Neither made man too much a God, Nor God too much a man." Of living Englishmen, it seems to us that Matthew Arnold combines in the highest degree great wealth of literary culture with the deepest thoughtfulness. This makes the charm of the present volume. Also, to his honor be it said,--and let due commendation be given to that trait,--he is of modern English essayists the least dogmatic. With fixed principles of art and very decided views of his own he combines a tolerance and a flexibility of mind which are very un-English. He is the least insular of his countrymen. It cannot be said of him, as he himself has said of Carlyle, that, with all his genius, he "has for the functions of the critic a little too much of the self-will and eccentricities of a genuine son of Great Britain." And yet, un-British as he is in these respects, Arnold, in one thing, is more national far than Carlyle,--in the manner, namely, in which he chooses to express his thought. Though deeply conversant with German literature, (as he is with French,) he has not suffered himself to be bitten with the Teutomania which infects so unpleasantly the diction of his self-willed countryman,--making his sentences seem like translations from Jean Paul, rather than utterances conceived in an English mind. He unites cosmopolitan liberality with English self-possession.