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ritics often go strangely wrong both in praise and in blame of new verse, it would be most surprising that _The Strayed Reveller_ volume should have attracted so little attention. It is full of faults, but that is part of the beauty of it. Some of these faults are those which, persevering, prevented Mr Arnold from attaining a higher position than he actually holds in poetry; but no critic could know that. There is nothing here worse, or more necessarily fatal, than many things in Tennyson's 1830 and 1832 collections: he overwent those, so might Mr Arnold have overgone these. And the promise--nay, the performance--is such as had been seen in no verse save Tennyson's, and the almost unnoticed Browning's, for some thirty years. The title-poem, though it should have pleased even a severe judge, might have aroused uncomfortable doubts even in an amiable one. In the first place, its rhymelessness is a caprice, a will-worship. Except blank verse, every rhymeless metre in English has on it the curse of the _tour de force_, of the acrobatic. Campion and Collins, Southey and Shelley, have done great things in it; but neither _Rose-cheeked Laura_ nor _Evening_, neither the great things in _Thalaba_ nor the great things in _Queen Mab_, can escape the charge of being caprices. And caprice, as some have held, is the eternal enemy of art. But the caprice of _The Strayed Reveller_ does not cease with its rhymelessness. The rhythm and the line-division are also studiously odd, unnatural, paradoxical. Except for the "poetic diction" of putting "Goddess" after "Circe" instead of before it, the first stave is merely a prose sentence, of strictly prosaic though not inharmonious rhythm. But in this stave there is no instance of the strangest peculiarity, and what seems to some the worst fault of the piece, the profusion of broken-up decasyllables, which sometimes suggest a very "corrupt" manuscript, or a passage of that singular stuff in the Caroline dramatists which is neither blank verse, nor any other, nor prose. Here are a few out of many instances-- "Is it, then, evening So soon? [_I see the night-dews Clustered in thick beads_], dim," etc. * * * ["_When the white dawn first Through the rough fir-planks. _"] * * * ["_Thanks, gracious One! Ah! the sweet fumes again._"] * * * ["_They see the Centaurs In the upper glens._"] One could treble th
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