-eagerly, seems the
lot of man upon earth! And meanwhile that

--"Power, too great and strong
Even for the gods to conquer or beguile,
Sweeps earth and heaven and men and gods along
Like the broad volume of the insurgent Nile
And the great powers we serve, themselves must be
Slaves of a tyrannous Necessity--"

Matthew Arnold had--and it is a rare gift--in spite of his peaceful
domestic life and in spite of that "interlude" of the "Marguerite"
poems--a noble and a chaste soul. "Give me a clean heart, O God,
and renew a right spirit within me!" prayed the Psalmist. Well! this
friend of Thyrsis had "a clean heart" and "a right spirit"; and these
things, in this turbulent age, have their appeal! It was the purging of
this "hyssop" that made it possible for him even in the "Marguerite"
poems, to write as only those can write whose passion is more than
the craving of the flesh.

"Come to me in my dreams and then
In sleep I shall be well again--
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day!"

It was the same chastity of the senses that made it possible for him
to write those verses upon a young girl's death, which are so much
more beautiful--though _those_ are lovely too--than the ones Oscar
Wilde wrote on the same subject.

"Strew on her, roses, roses,
But never a spray of yew;
For in silence she reposes--
Ah! would that I did too!
Her cabined ample spirit
It fluttered and failed for breath.
Tonight it doth inherit
The vasty halls of death."

Matthew Arnold is one of the poets who have what might be called
"the power of Liberation." He liberates us from the hot fevers of our
lusts. He liberates us from our worldliness, our perversions, our mad
preoccupations. He reduces things to their simple elements and
gives us back air and water and land and sea. And he does this
without demanding from us any unusual strain. We have no need to
plunge into Dionysian ecstacies, or cry aloud after "cosmic
emotion."

We have no need to relinquish our common sense; or to dress or eat
or talk or dream, in any strange manner. It is enough if we remember
the fields where we were born. It is enough if we do not altogether
forget out of what quarter of the sky Orion rises; and where the
lord-star Jupiter has his place. It is enough if we are not quite
oblivious of the return of the Spring and the sprouting of the