310 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OP' CANADA 



noisy rivalries that possess the modern world. A more penetrating 

 version of the same idea is found in the later poem "Self Dependence," 

 and echoes of the same thought are constantly heard in his poetry: 



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. 



The will to neither strive nor cry, 

 The power to feel with others give! 

 Calm, calm me more! nor let me die 

 Before I have begun to live. 



Lines in Kensington Gardens. 



The sonnet "To a Preacher" forbids us to think that Arnold 

 was insensible to the surface flaws of passion that nature may seem 

 to exhibit even to the most unwary observer. But what he points 

 to rather is "the central peace subsisting at the heart of endless 

 agitation," the abiding and ultimate calm of the universal life envisaged 

 as a totality, and the unswerving security of natural law. And he 

 is always eager to rebuke our ambitions by the contrast of our evanes- 

 cent lives with the continuity of the life of the world. (A Summer 

 Night.) But with the rebuke there is also at times a fortifying hint 

 of consolation, as in the majestic close of the "Sohrab and Rustum," 

 which far from being the artificial appendage it is sometimes unjustly 

 held to be is rather one of the highest strokes of art to be found in 

 modern poetry. Here our griefs are resolved, and as the verse un- 

 folds the image of the great river flowing on under the frosty starlight 

 to its home in the Aral Sea, the urgencies of human distress are caught 

 up into and merged with the vast scheme of things. The desolating 

 consciousness, too, that we are individual focal points for disaster 

 receives its befitting admonition. The poet would not have us crushed 

 by a sense of our littleness, but exhilarated and heartened rather by 

 the realization that there is something other and larger than our 

 griefs. 



Arnold might not inappropriately be described as a man of 

 romantic nerves and classic mind. The warfare in his nature is be- 

 tween impulse and restraint, and even to his admirers it may seem 

 that the victory of the latter, though not ignobly gained, is still 

 to be regretted. He is the only poet of his day who was prompted 

 to write such low-pulsed pieces as are his "Second Best" and his 

 "Resignation." In this last named poem he is careful to instruct 



