One wonders sometimes if it be properly understood by energetic teachers of youth that there is only one intellectual attitude towards life, only one philosophy, only one ultimate mood. This is that mood of "resignation," which, from Homer to Matthew Arnold, is alone adapted, in the long run, to the taste of our days upon earth. The real elements of our situation have not altered in the remotest degree since Achilles dragged Hector round the walls of Troy. Men and women still love and hate; still "enjoy the sun" and "live light in the Spring"; still "advance true friends and beat back dangerous foes"--and upon them the same Constellations look down; and upon them the same winds blow; and upon them the same Sphinx glides through the obscurity, with the same insoluble Question. Nothing has really changed. The "river of time" may pass through various landscapes, but it is the same river, and, at the last, it brings to us, as "the banks fade dimmer away" and "the stars come out" "murmurs and scents" of the same infinite Sea. Yes, there is only one Philosophy, as Disraeli said, jesting; and Matthew Arnold, among the moderns, is the one who has been allowed to put it into his poetry. For though, before the "Flamantia Moenia" of the world's triple brass, we are fain to bow our heads inconsolably, there come those moments when, a hand laid in ours, we think we know "the hills whence our life flows"! The flowing of the river of life--the washing of the waves of life--how well one recalls, from Arnold's broken and not always musical stanzas, references to that sound--to the sound so like the sound of those real sea-tides that "Sophocles, long ago, heard in the Aegaean," and listened, thinking of many things, as we listen and think of many things today! "For we are all like swimmers in the Sea, Poised on the top of a huge wave of Fate, And whether it will lift us to the land Or whether it will bear us out to Sea, Back out to Sea, to the dark gulfs of Death, We know not-- Only the event will teach us, in its hour." I sometimes think that a certain wonderful blending of realism and magic in Matthew Arnold's poetry has received but scant justice. In "The Forsaken Merman" for instance, there are many stanzas that make you smell the salt-foam and imagine all that lies, hidden and strange, down there upon the glittering sand. That line, "Where great whales go sailing by Round the world for ever and aye," has a liberating power that may often recur, when one is, God knows, far enough from the spouting of any whale! And the whole poem has a wistful, haunting beauty that never grows tedious.