oet, one finds it necessary to subjoin, are the beautiful
_Resignation_, which Mr Humphry Ward had the good taste to
include in the appendix to his _English Poets_; and the curious,
characteristic, and not much short of admirable _Dream_, which in
the earlier issues formed part of _Switzerland_, and should never
have been excluded from it. It is probably the best selection by a
poet from his own works that has ever been issued, and this is saying
not a little. Nor does one like Mr Arnold less for his saying,
reported either by Mr Ward or Lord Coleridge, that he had rather have
given _all_ the poems.

As for the "Wordsworth" and the "Byron," they gain enormously by "this
man's estimate of them," and do not lose by "this man's" selection. I
have had occasion, not once or twice only, and for purposes not
invariably the same, to go through the Wordsworth book carefully, side
by side with the complete poems, in order to see whether anything has
necessarily to be added. I really do not know what has, unless it be a
few of the oases from the deserts of the _Excursion_, the
_Prelude_, and the then not published _Recluse_. Wordsworth's real
titles are put in once for all; the things by which he must stand or
fall are there. The professor, the very thorough-going student, the
literary historian, must go farther; the idle person with a love of
literature will; but nobody need.

And the Introduction (for after all we can all make our selections for
ourselves, with a very little trouble) is still more precious. I know
few critical essays which give me more pleasure in reading and
re-reading than this. Not that I agree with it by any means as a
whole; but he is in the mere "Pettys" of criticism (it is true not
many seem to get beyond) who judges a critical essay by his own
agreement with it. Mr Arnold puts Wordsworth, as a poet and an English
poet, far higher than I can put him. He is not so great a poet to my
thinking as Spenser or Shelley; if it were possible in these
competitions to allow weight for age, he is not as great a poet as
Keats; I am sure he is not a greater poet than Tennyson; I cannot give
him rank above Heine or Hugo, though the first may be sometimes
naughty and the second frequently silly or rhetorical; and when Mr
Arnold begins to reckon Moliere in, I confess I am lost. When and
where did Moliere write poetry? But these things do not matter; they
are the things on which reviewers exercise their "will it be
beli