Matthew Arnold is a true classical poet. It is strictly in accordance with the authentic tradition to introduce those touches of light, quaint, playful, airy realism into the most solemn poetry. It is what Virgil, Catullus, Theocritus, Milton, Landor, all did. Some persons grow angry with him for a certain tone of half-gay, half-sad, allusive tenderness, when he speaks of Oxford and the country round Oxford. I do not think there is anything unpleasing in this. So did Catullus talk of Sirmio; Horace of his Farm; Milton of "Deva's wizard-stream"; Landor of Sorrento and Amalfi. It is all of a piece with the "resignation" of a philosophy which does not expect that this or that change of dwelling will ease our pain; of a philosophy that naturally loves to linger over familiar well-sides and roadways and meadow-paths and hillsides, over the places where we went together, when we "still had Thyrsis." The direct Nature-poetry of Matthew Arnold, touching us with the true classic touch, and yet with something, I know not what, of more wistful tenderness added, is a great refreshment after the pseudo-magic, so vague and unsatisfying, of so much modern verse. "It matters not. Light-comer he has flown! But we shall have him in the sweet spring days, With whitening hedges and uncrumpling fern, And blue-bells trembling by the forest ways, And scent of hay new-mown--" Or that description of the later season: "Too quick despairer! Wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon shall we have gold-dusted Snapdragon, Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell, And Stocks, in fragrant blow. Roses that down the alleys shine afar, And open Jasmin-muffled lattices, And groups under the dreaming garden-trees, And the pale Moon and the white Evening-Star." True to the "only philosophy," Matthew Arnold is content to indicate how for each one of us the real drama of life goes on with a certain quite natural, quite homely, quite quiet background of the strip of earth where we first loved and dreamed, and were happy, and were sad, and knew loss and regret, and the limits of man's power to change his fate. There is a large and noble calm about the poetry of this writer which has the effect upon one of the falling of cool water into a dark, fern-fringed cave. He strips away lightly, delicately, gently, all the trappings of our feverish worldliness, our vanity and ambition, and lifts open, at one touch, the great moon-bathed windows that look out upon the line of white foam--and the patient sands. And never is this calm deeper than when he refers to Death. "For there" he says, speaking of that Cemetery at Firenze where his Thyrsis lies; "For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep The morningless and unawakening sleep, Under the flowery Oleanders pale--"