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In the latter part of "Rugby Chapel" one feels the presence of that powerful stream of moral energy which flowed from father to son, preserving him through the sandy and desert places of his thought, and making him at length a positive and shining force in the world. Let us conclude our consideration of his personal poems with the exultant notes of this tribute:

And through thee I believe

In the noble and great who are gone;
Pure souls honored and blest

By former ages, who else—
Such, so soulless, so poor,

Is the race of men whom I see-
Seemed but a dream of the heart,
Seemed but a cry of desire.
Yes! I believe that there lived
Others like thee in the past,

Not like the men of the crowd
Who all round me to-day

Bluster or cringe, and make life
Hideous and arid and vile;

But souls tempered with fire,

Fervent, heroic, and good,

Helpers and friends of mankind.

Servants of God!-or sons

Shall I not call you? because

Not as servants ye knew

Your Father's innermost mind,

His who unwillingly sees

One of his little ones lost,-
Yours is the praise, if mankind
Hath not as yet in its march
Fainted and fallen and died.

See! In the rocks of the world
Marches the host of mankind,
A feeble, wavering line.

Where are they tending? A God
Marshalled them, gave them their goal.
Ah, but the way is so long!

Years they have been in the wild:
Sore thirst plagues them; the rocks,
Rising all round, overawe;

Factions divide them; their host
Threatens to break, to dissolve.
Ah! keep, keep them combined!
Else, of the myriads who fill
That army, not one shall arrive;
Sole they shall stray; on the rocks
Batter forever in vain,

Die one by one in the waste.

Then, in such hour of need

Of your fainting, dispirited race,
Ye like angels appear,

Radiant with ardor divine.

Beacons of hope, ye appear!

Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,

Weariness not on your brow.

Ye alight in our van! at your voice,
Panic, despair, flee away.

Ye move through the ranks, recall

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CHAPTER III

POEMS OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD

"To be less and less personal in one's desires and workings is the great matter, and this too I feel, I am glad to say, more deeply than I did, but for progress in the direction of the 'seeketh not her own' there is always room."-Letters, I, 400.

TH

HE impulse to express spiritual desolation, to which Arnold yielded in "Empedocles" and numerous shorter pieces, was almost from the outset in conflict with his own theory of the function of poetry. The true end of all art, he held, and of poetry especially is, like that of religion, to strengthen and uphold the heart with high inspirations and consolations. The great poet-this one learns of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare does not pour into the world the unchecked flood of his personal emotions. He rises above his individual passions and affairs to survey the wide course of human life; to feel and comment upon its permanent and significant aspects; to illustrate the fortitude and the moral splendor with which man may confront the indignity of his lot. In "Resignation," published in 1849 in the first volume of his verse, Arnold, describing the character of the poet,

writes an indirect condemnation of many of his more intimate effusions:

The poet, to whose mighty heart
Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart,
Subdues that energy to scan

Not his own course, but that of man.

Lean'd on his gate, he gazes-tears
Are in his eyes, and in his ears
The murmur of a thousand years.
Before him he sees life unroll,

A placid and continuous whole-
That general life, which does not cease,
Whose secret is not joy, but peace.

It is noteworthy that Arnold recognized the inconsistency of “Empedocles" with his critical principles, and withdrew it from circulation. In the important preface to his poetical volume of 1853 he explains both why he had been attracted to the subject and why on reflection he suppressed the work. The dis-! cussion provides us an interesting approach to his other long poems. He had been drawn to Empedocles by that sense of kinship in philosophic melancholy which drew him to Senancour and Amiel. "I intended to delineate," he says, "the feelings of one of the last of the Greek religious philosophers, one of the family of Orpheus and Musæus, having survived his fellows, living on into a time when the

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