e reasons of this comparative sterility are
interesting, and not quite so obvious as they may appear. It is true,
indeed,--it is an arch-truth which has been too rarely
recognised,--that something like complete idleness, or at any rate
complete freedom from regular mental occupation, is necessary to the
man who is to do poetic work great in quality and in quantity at once.
The hardest occupation--and Mr Arnold's, though hard, was not exactly
that--will indeed leave a man sufficient time, so far as mere time is
concerned, to turn out as much verse as the most fertile of poets has
ever produced. But then that will scarcely do. The Muses are
feminine--and it has been observed that you cannot make up even to the
most amiable and reasonable of that sex for refusing to attend to her
at the minute when she wants _you_, by devoting even hours, even days,
when you are at leisure for _her_. To put the thing more seriously,
though perhaps not more truly, the human brain is not so constituted
that you can ride or drive or "train" from school to school, examining
as you go, for half-a-dozen or half-a-score hours a-day, or that you
can devote the same time to the weariest and dreariest of all
businesses, the reading of hundreds of all but identical answers to
the same stock questions, and yet be fresh and fertile for imaginative
composition. The nearest contradictory instances to this proposition
are those of Scott and Southey, and they are, in more ways than one or
two, very damaging instances--exceptions which, in a rather horrible
manner, do prove the rule. To less harassing, and especially less
peremptory, work than Mr Arnold's, as well as far more literary in
kind, Scott sacrificed the minor literary graces, Southey immolated
the choicer fruits of genius which he undoubtedly possessed the power
of producing; and both "died from the top downward."

But there was something more than this. Mr Arnold's poetic ambition,
as we have seen, did not aim at very long and elaborate works. His
forte was the occasional piece--which might still suggest itself and
be completed--which, as we shall see, did sometimes suggest itself and
was completed--in the intervals, the holidays, the relaxations of his
task. And if these lucid and lucent intervals, though existent, were
so rare, their existence and their rarity together suggest that
something more than untoward circumstance is to blame for the fact
that they did not show themselves oftener. A f