She comb'd its bright hair, and she tended it well, In the little grey church on the shore to-day. And I lose my poor soul, Merman! here with thee." Children dear, were we long alone? "The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan; Where the sea-stocks bloom, to the white-wall'd town; From the church came a murmur of folk at their prayers, panes. She sate by the pillar; we saw her clear: For her eyes were seal'd to the holy book! Come away, children, call no more! Down, down, down! Down to the depths of the sea! She sits at her wheel in the humming town, Singing most joyfully. Hark what she sings: "O joy, O joy, For the humming street, and the child with its toy For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well; For the wheel where I spun, And the blessed light of the sun!" And so she sings her fill, Singing most joyfully, Till the spindle drops from her hand, And the whizzing wheel stands still. She steals to the window, and looks at the sand, And over the sand at the sea; And her eyes are set in a stare; A long, long sigh, For the cold strange eyes of a little mermaiden, And the gleam of her golden hair. Come away, away, children; She will start from her slumber Will hear the waves roar. The waves roar and whirl, A ceiling of amber, A pavement of pearl. Singing: "Here came a mortal, But faithless was she! And alone dwell for ever The kings of the sea." But, children, at midnight, We will gaze, from the sand-hills, At the white, sleeping town; At the church on the hill-side- Singing: "There dwells a loved one, She left lonely for ever The kings of the sea." CHAPTER IV LITERARY CRITICISM "I think the moment is, on the whole, favourable for the Essays; and in going through them I am struck by the admirable riches of human nature that are brought to light in the group of persons whom they treat, and the sort of unity that as a book to stimulate the better humanity in us the volume has."-Letters, I, 286-7.-January, 1865. [UCH of what passes for literary criticism is a very perishable branch of literature. Most of Arnold's essays in this kind remain as sound, vital and interesting to-day as when they were written. By their virtue he probably exercises thirty years after his death a more constant and important influence upon current literary opinion and taste than any English critic living. The persistence of his critical force in literature is ascribable in the main to three causes. The first of these is clearly brought out in the passage of the letter quoted above: he did not attempt a chronicle of all the popular and transitory work issuing from the press; he carefully selected for comment men and books which he thought had some mark of immortality about them; he assembled, as he says, a group of persons illustrating the "admirable riches of human The first question which we ask, in these days of world-wide war, regarding any one who ventures an opinion of European politics is whether he is "proAlly" or "pro-German." The waves of prejudice and passion set in motion by the great conflict wash every coast; and we find it difficult to conceive of any disinterested commentator. At the present moment it seems to some sensitive souls as if the statesmen of every nation, the poets, the historians, even the men of science, were all patriotically engaged in lying, at home and abroad, for their countries. The cynically philosophical tell us that the now inflamed and apparent mendacity of mankind is only a magnification of our normal and habitual disinclination |