How it were good to live there and be free.
In Kensington Gardens he says:
In the huge world that roars hard by
Be happy if they can!
Calm soul of all things! Make it mine
To feel, amid the city’s jar
That there abides a peace of thine
Man did not make and cannot mar.
Nowhere in all his pictures of nature, given in the most musical of English and in style flowing, bright and tender, do we find the deep gladness of Wordsworth, or the organ-toned joy of Milton. To each, as his heart is, nature gives. Arnold, sad, unbelieving, self-absorbed, looking at his own shadow, sees the beautiful and sings it, as he finds it, but, “life is wanting there.” As our human race appears in his poems, the men of to-day are of small account. “There has passed away a glory from the earth.” He has little to say of hope, so much in his eye is the past better than any possible future. Even his favorite metres are of Greek pattern. Admitting that the Pagan world, worn and weary, was revived by Christianity, he thinks this is in its turn “outworn,” and men are waning now. Therefore he goes to olden time for heroes, for Prometheus and Pericle, Tristam and Rustum. His only poem truly dramatic, a complete work of art, is The Sick King in Bokhara. The elements of the story bring out his genius, and he puts forth the best effort of his mind and art. Here are that dignified self-poise, that unrest akin to remorse that frames so strangely with the calm of helplessness, that lip-curling criticism and that transparent simplicity of which we have been speaking. All is brilliant in setting and rich in color. All his poems we might read (and we should then all the more watch for new ones) but in none shall find the whole of Mr. Arnold as we find it in this.
How beautiful is this from Tristam. It is Iseult after the death of her husband and rival, living with her children, as in a fading, misty, moon-lit dream: