the misery Arnold paints in the poem, but delight and life, even rapture.
I say no more of his poetry of nature. I pass to his poetry of man, and here I must risk repetition, and take up, in this new connection, poems on which I have already written. He cared for the beauty of the natural world, but he cared far more for the landscape of the soul of man. It was at first the landscape of his own life-its rivers, its buried life,
And the sea where it goes,
the voices which called it in the night, of which he first wrote with his serious stoic passion. But the time came when the landscape of the soul of the world, of humanity at large, engaged him far more than that of the little world within him. He sang of man's history in the past, but chiefly of his own age and country, and of the battle for life and God in which he moved; yet, even now, he still remained more of an interested spectator than of a fighter. It was only when he gave up verse that he became a warrior hotly engaged in the fray. But whether spectator or not, it is when he is writing not about himself but about the soul of man travailing through its foes to the City of God that he is at his best as a poet. The larger subject makes the lovelier verse, when one is a poet at all. Even in the earliest poems, as in Resignation and in the passion of Philomela, he began, as also in some
