its uniqueness, of its excellence, of its keen fitness for these later times, even when he still retained somewhat in it of his old apartness—but that is not my business in this essay. I pass on to those other poems of his which are outside of the struggle I have described, which belong to subjects more or less independent of its pain. Moreover, as I have written of the poems in their relation to the time in which he lived, so now it is their poetry itself which, as far as I can, I shall try to estimate.
"The eternal objects of poetry," said Arnold in his Preface to the Poems of 1853, "are actions, human actions," Excellent actions! he goes on to say,[1] "and excellent actions are those which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections, feelings which are permanent and the same in the race, in all climes, and at all times. Poetical work belongs to the domain of our permanent passions; let it interest these, and it does not matter whether the subject is ancient or modern, But, as in the ancient subjects the action is greater, the personages nobler, the situations more intense, those critics are wrong who say that the poet must leave the 'exhausted past' and draw his subjects from matters of present importance."
No wise critic would ever say that the poet should not take his subjects from the past, or that the subjects
- ↑ I do not quote the whole statement, only passages from it, but I refer my readers to the book. It is too long to quote in extenso.
