Four Victorian poets Author:Stopford Augustus Brooke Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MATTHEW ARNOLD MATTHEW ARNOLD, who is loved as a poet by so many of us, and justly loved; whom we do not read continuously as we read the greater poets, but w... more »ho suits us so well in certain circumstances of the inner life; who, in them, reflects and strengthens us; whose poetry, always unimitative and underived, rose clear out of his own soul; who stood alone with an ill-hidden scorn for other English poetry in his eyes—was worthy of more acceptance as a poet than he received in his lifetime, and has his own distinct chair in the general assembly and church of the first-born of England. He was unfortunate in the time in which be began to be a poet, if any man who has a strong will, a clear aim, a joyous temper, and a bold faith, can .be called unfortunate at any time. Arnold had a strong will, but it was not strong enough to master within himself the sceptical spirit of .his age (which, however useful, is not poetical), or the unpoetic spirit of self- analysis, which, in men of the poetic temperament, naturally accompanies the habit of scepticism. Inquiry is a good thing, but it is prosaic. It is true that Arnold grew into a clear aim, but he was at first too contemptuous of the world in which he lived, and too apart from it to give it that sympathy with its goods, which is one of the needs-be of a poet's power. He had courage, but it was not the courage of faith or of hope; he had little firm faith or hope in God, or in man, or, I may say, in himself. He had insight into the evils, the dulness, the follies, the deci.y, and death of the time at which he wrote; but he had little insight into its good, into the hopes and ideas which were arising in its darkness, or the life which was collecting itself together under its decay. His temper, therefore, was not joyous, nor was i...« less