Arnold’s gift of bringing a certain spare prose quality with profit into his poetry is not, therefore, to be observed in his use of such words as “magnificent” and the rest, which are naturally enough poetic, and not dangerous so long as they are kept clearly distinguished from the specifically prose “gorgeous” group. Nor, again, as we have seen, is it to be found in his control of such simplicities as “the sun is bright,” since these also are--or can be in right usage--essentially poetic. Also it is a distinct thing from that other simplicity that relies at moments of almost overwhelming emotion upon an expression stripped of every syllable that can go and yet, throbbing with momentum, having nothing in it of understatement; the kind of expression of which Shakespeare was the supreme master-- Soft you. A word or two before you go. I have done the state some service, and they know’t. No more of that.... and O! that a man might know The end of this day’s business, ere it come; But it sufficeth that the day will end And then the end is known ... and She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word.... The quality of which we are speaking in Arnold was, rather, a certain sudden tempering of the diction in poetry, with magical result. It was a quality that he more than any other poet of his time recovered from the seventeenth century, the age of poets like Vaughan and Marvell who could lift us to the height of poetic enjoyment with such prose-habited devices as-- Where no rude foot e’er trod, Where, since he walk’d there, only go Prophets and friends of God.... and The grave’s a fine and private place. These are not at all in the same kind as “She should have died hereafter.” They depend for their effect not upon the sudden release of vast cumulative passion, but upon the lovely--almost arrogant--draft upon commonplace, the perfectly judged use of “friends” and “fine” at their utterly unexpected but divinely appointed moments. And this effect Arnold could often come by, and the rest of the Victorians hardly ever. Here are two examples-- I have a fretted brick-work tomb Upon a hill on the right hand, Hard by a close of apricots Upon the road to Samarcand. Thither, O Vizier, will I bear This man my pity could not save: And, plucking up the marble flags, There lay his body in my grave. Bring water, nard, and linen rolls, Wash off all blood, set smooth each limb. They say: “He was not wholly vile, Because a king shall bury him.” ... and