recalled him from it, and bade him consider how little the history of his own soul supported the far-off hopes for man into which he had been momentarily hurried by poetic imagination. The highest, the most inspiring passion which can thrill a poet was therefore not his in the first years of his poetry. This self-involvement and this isolation from the universal hope of man are the great weakness inherent in stoicism, and when they belong to an artist, they enfeeble his art. Only by drinking incessantly at the deep wells of common humanity does a poet win the power to rejoice in his creative work, and the love which enables him to continue it till old age. Arnold, in the end, even though he did gain much self-forgetful sympathy with humanity, found his poetic power fail. His vein was exhausted. He took to prose. But the greater men, not isolated from but intimately mixed with all men: if not in life, yet by the imagination of love; not self-involved but self-forgetful—love the whole movement of mankind, even the noise and restlessness of it, appeal to and win the universal love they give, are always impassioned by the divinity which they see everywhere in man, think nothing common or unclean, and live, eagerly creating to the close.
However, there is something to say on the other side. Arnold was too human to be the finished stoic. The stoic demand for duty, for obedience to the eternal laws of right, was always with him. It often fills his poetry with an austere beauty. It keeps much of its
