So was the hush;"

the honey-dropping trochees of the _New Sirens_; the description
of the poet in _Resignation_; the outburst--

"What voices are these on the clear night air?"

of _Tristram and Iseult_; the melancholy meditation of _A
Summer Night_ and _Dover Beach_, with the plangent note so
cunningly yet so easily accommodated to the general tone and motive of
the piece,--these and a hundred other things fulfil all the
requirements of the true poetic criticism, which only marks, and only
asks for, the _differentia_ of poetry.

And this poetic moment--this (if one may use the words, about another
matter, of one who wrote no poetry, yet had more than all but three or
four poets), this "exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss
of the spouse, and ingression into the divine shadow" which poetry and
poetry alone confers upon the fit readers of it--is never far off or
absent for long together in Mr Arnold's verse. His command of it is
indeed uncertain. But all over his work, from _The Strayed
Reveller_ to _Westminster Abbey_, it may happen at any minute,
and it does happen at many minutes. This is what makes a poet: not the
most judicious selection of subject, not the most studious
contemplation and, as far as he manages it, representation of the
grand style and the great masters. And this is what Mr Arnold has.

That his prose, admirable as it always is in form and invaluable as it
often is in matter, is on the whole inferior to his verse, is by no
means a common opinion, though it was expressed by some good judges
both during his life and at the time of his death. As we have seen,
both from a chance indication in his own letters and from Mr Humphry
Ward's statement, he took very great pains with it; indeed, internal
evidence would be sufficient to establish this if we had no positive
external testimony whatsoever. He came at a fortunate time, when the
stately yet not pompous or over-elaborated model of the latest
Georgian prose, raised from early Georgian "drabness" by the efforts
of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke, but not proceeding to the extremes of
any of the three, was still the academic standard; but when a certain
freedom on the one side, and a certain grace and colour on the other,
were being taken from the new experiments of nineteenth-century prose
proper. Whether he or his contemporary Mr Froude was the greatest
master of this particular blend is a question which no doubt had best
be answered by