e, than Gray's--like that of Gray. The poet has in him a vein,
or, if the metaphor be preferred, a spring, of the most real and
rarest poetry. But the vein is constantly broken by faults, and never
very thick; the spring is intermittent, and runs at times by drops
only. There is always, as it were, an effort to get it to yield
freely, to run clear and constant. And--again as in the case of
Gray--the poet subjects himself to a further disability by all manner
of artificial restrictions, struggles to comply with this or that
system, theories, formulas, tricks. He will not "indulge his genius."
And so it is but rarely that we get things like the _Scholar-Gipsy_,
like the _Forsaken Merman_, like the second _Isolation_; and when we
do get such things there is sometimes, as in the case of the
peroration to _Sohrab and Rustum_, and perhaps the splendid
opening of _Westminster Abbey_ and _Thyrsis_, a certain
sense of parade, of the elaborate assumption of the singing-robe.
There is too seldom the sensation which Coleridge unconsciously
suggested in the poem that heralded the poetry of the nineteenth
century. We do not feel that

"The fair breeze blew, the while foam flew,
The furrow followed free"--

that

"We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea;"

but that a mighty launch of elaborate preparation is taking place,
that we are pleased and orderly spectators standing round, and that
the ship is gliding in due manner, but with no rush or burst, into the
sea of poetry. While elsewhere there may be even the sense of effort
and preparation without the success.

But, once more, a poet is to be judged first by his best things, and
secondly by a certain _aura_ or atmosphere, by a nameless,
intangible, but sensible quality, which, now nearer and fuller, now
farther and fainter, is over his work throughout. In both respects Mr
Arnold passes the test. The things mentioned above and others, even
many others, are the right things. They do not need the help of that
rotten reed, the subject, to warrant and support them; we know that
they are in accordance with the great masters, but we do not care
whether they are or not. They sound the poetic note; they give the
poetic flash and iridescence; they cause the poetic intoxication. Even
in things not by any means of the best as wholes, you may follow that
gleam safely. The exquisite revulsion of the undertone in
_Bacchanalia_--

"Ah! so the silence was,