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; By former ages, who else— Is the race of men whom I see- Not like the men of the crowd Bluster or cringe, and make life 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,- See! In the rocks of the world Where are they tending? A God Years they have been in the wild: Factions divide them; their host Die one by one in the waste. Then, in such hour of need Of your fainting, dispirited race, Radiant with ardor divine. Beacons of hope, ye appear! Languor is not in your heart, Weariness not on your brow. Ye alight in our van! at your voice, Ye move through the ranks, recall 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 Not his own course, but that of man. Lean'd on his gate, he gazes-tears A placid and continuous whole- 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 |