self-inquiry, canst thou, in humility, attain to peace."
Then there is another poem—The Buried Life—it too, touches only one aspect, one fragment of the problem of life. The poem, full of imaginative beauty, has also its deep interest; it touches what we imagine in the mysticism of the heart of the subconscious stream of our being the unexplored tracts of our nature, the revealing of which we wait for so long and so vainly. Even two lovers, Arnold thought, cannot tell each other what they are. They would if they could, but their buried life flows on, unseen, unknown. Fate, knowing how we are led astray by the apparent and confused, has ordained it thus, in order that our truer life should not be mastered by the apparent; but live within itself, independent of the world. We are beset with longing to find our actual self. In vain we strive; yet could we find it, we should be at rest. Only at times, fallings from us, vanishings, airs, floating echoes, "as from an infinite distant land," reveal or seem to reveal the heart of the life which beats within:—
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life's flow;
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where he glides, the sun, the breeze.
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
