scientific system of thought." But surely we find in his own poetry a
sustained doctrine of self-mastery, duty, and pursuit of truth, which is
essentially ethical, and, in its form, as nearly "scientific" and
systematic as the nature of poetry permits. And this doctrine is
conveyed, not by positive, hortatory, or didactic methods, but by
Criticism--the calm praise of what commends itself to his judgment, the
gentle but decisive rebuke of whatever offends or darkens or misleads.
Of him it may be truly said, as he said of Goethe, that

He took the suffering human race,
He read each wound, each weakness clear;
And struck his finger on the place,
And said: _Thou ailest here, and here._

His deepest conviction about "the suffering human race" would seem to
have been that its worst miseries arise from a too exalted estimate of
its capacities. Men are perpetually disappointed and disillusioned
because they expect too much from human life and human nature, and
persuade themselves that their experience, here and hereafter, will be,
not what they have any reasonable grounds for expecting, but what they
imagine or desire. The true philosophy is that which

Neither makes man too much a god,
Nor God too much a man.

Wordsworth thought it a boon to "feel that we are greater than we know":
Arnold thought it a misfortune. Wordsworth drew from the shadowy
impressions of the past the most splendid intimations of the future.
Against such vain imaginings Arnold set, in prose, the "inexorable
sentence" in which Butler warned us to eschew pleasant self-deception;
and, in verse, the persistent question--

Say, what blinds us, that we claim the glory
Of possessing powers not our share?

He rebuked

Wishes unworthy of a man full-grown.

He taught that there are

Joys which were not for our use designed.

He warned discontented youth not to expect greater happiness from
advancing years, because

one thing only has been lent
To youth and age in common--discontent.

Friendship is a broken reed, for

Our vaunted life is one long funeral,

and even Hope is buried with the "faces that smiled and fled."

Death, at least in some of its aspects, seemed to him the

Stern law of every mortal lot,
Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear;
And builds himself I know not what
Of second life I know not where.

And yet, in gleams of happier insight, he saw