and the full, solemn music of the verse, make
it unquestionably the masterpiece of Arnold's longer poems, among
which it is the largest in bulk and also the most ambitious in
scheme." _Balder Dead_, a characteristic Arnoldian production, founded
upon the Norse legend of Balder, Lok, and Hader, though not so great
as _Sohrab and Rustum_, has much poetic worth and ranks high among its
kind; and _Tristram and Iseult_, with its infinite tragedy, and _The
Sick King in Bokhara_, gorgeous in oriental color, are rare examples
of the lyrical epic. _The Forsaken Merman_ and _Saint Brandan_, which
are dealt with elsewhere in this volume, are good examples of his
shorter narrative poems. In _Thyrsis_, the beautiful threnody in which
he celebrated his dead friend, Clough, Arnold gave to the world one of
its greatest elegies. One finds in this poem and its companion piece,
_The Scholar-Gipsy_, the same unity of classic form with romantic
feeling present in _Sohrab and Rustum_. Both are crystal-clear without
coldness, and restrained without loss of a full volume of power.
Mr. Saintsbury, writing of _The Scholar-Gipsy_, says: "It has
everything--a sufficient scheme, a definite meaning and purpose, a
sustained and adequate command of poetical presentation, and passages
and phrases of the most exquisite beauty;" and no less praise is due
_Thyrsis_. Other of his elegiac poems are _Heine's Grave, Stanzas from
the Grande Chartreuse, Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Obermann,"
Obermann Once More, Rugby Chapel_, and _Memorial Verses_, the two last
named being included in this volume. In such measures as are used in
these poems, in the long, stately, swelling measures, whose graver
movements accord with a serious and elevated purpose, Arnold was most
at ease.

=Greek Spirit in Arnold=.--But it is not alone in the fact that he
selects classic subjects, and writes after the manner of the great
masters, that Arnold's affinity with the Greeks is manifested. His
poems in spirit, as in form, reflect the moods common to the ancient
Hellenes, "One feels the (Greek) quality," writes George E. Woodberry,
"not as a source, but as a presence. In Tennyson, Keats, and Shelley
there was Greek influence, but in them the result was modern. In
Arnold the antiquity remains--remains in mood, just as in Landor it
remains in form. The Greek twilight broods over all his poetry. It is
pagan in philosophic spirit, not Attic, but of later and stoical time;
with th