-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--"

Sometimes, as in his "Tristram and Iseult," he is permitted little
touches of a startling and penetrating beauty; such as, returning to
one's memory and lips, in very dusty and arid places, bring all the
tears of half-forgotten romance back again to us and restore to us the
despair that is dearer than hope!

Those lines, for instance, when Tristram, dying in his fire-lit,
tapestried room, tended by the pale Iseult of Brittany, knows that his
death-longing is fulfilled, and that she, his "other" Iseult, has come
to him at last--have they not the very echo in them of what such
weariness feels when, only not too late, the impossible happens?
Little he cares for the rain beating on the roof, or the moan of the
wind in the chimney, or the shadows on that tapestried wall! He
listens--his heart almost stops.

"What voices are those in the still night air?
What lights in the court? What steps on the stair?"

One wonders if the reader, too, knows and loves, that strange
fragmentary unrhymed poem, called "the Strayed Reveller," with its
vision of Circe and the sleeping boy-faun, and the wave-tossed
Wanderer, and its background of "fitful earth-murmurs" and
"dreaming woods"--Strangely down, upon the weary child, smiles
the great enchantress, seeing the wine stains on his white skin, and
the berries in his hair. The thing is slight enough; but in its coolness,
and calmness, and sad delicat