320 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



Each rose with blushing face; 

 She loved the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain, 



But ah, of our poor Thames she never heard! 



Her foot the Cumner cowslips never stirr'd ; 

 And we should tease her with our plaint in vain ! 



A poet who can write like this is justified in sleeping with Homer 

 under his pillow. Johnson and his present day survivors who clamour 

 for a resolute modernity are answered if not confuted by stanzas such 

 as these which combine in so exquisite a harmony the poetry of 

 reminiscence and allusion with the poetic necessities of the immediate 

 hour. The danger only is that a field so richly harvested will provide 

 scant gleaning for succeeding generations. Nor will the newer times 

 readily discover a poet to whom as to Arnold the ancient speech and 

 the ancient themes are native and natural. His sincerity might prove 

 another poet's pretence, but of Arnold himself we may say that he 

 has sufficiently demonstrated that all themes are proper to a poet 

 which he can make imaginatively his own. 



A source of appeal in the "Thyrsis" even stronger, and stronger 

 because more universal, than the appeal to our vagrant classical 

 memories, derives from Arnold's imaginative and tender evocation 

 of the less distant past. In no other poem that I know are human 

 sympathies more subtly and lovingly inwrought into the landscape. 

 The fields, the meadows and the hills where Thyrsis and Cory don 

 once roamed together, when youth and the dreams of youth were 

 theirs, though their remembrance may quicken the survivor's sorrow 

 for the unreturning days, have still the power to chasten and subdue 

 the heart of his grief, and all hope is not darkened in his mind while 

 the Fyfield elm that had stood to them both for a sign and symbol 

 still lifts its branches to the sky. 



Great poetry admits no distinction between the local and the 

 universal. Our feet may never have crushed the Cumner cowslips, 

 nor our eyes have been gladdened by the white and p'urple fritillaries 

 that spring in the Magdalen meadows, yet through the magic of these 

 verses the sweet "city with her dreaming spires" and all the lovely 

 landscape that hems her in become too a part of our inheritance. 



Erratum 



Quarterly issue for September, Section II., page 192, 23rd line, 

 for Fort Smith read Fort Vancouver. 



