the movement toward some new dawn of knowledge-brightened faith.
A few verses from his "Dover Beach" are in the key of several of his most touching lyrics,—in The troubled heart.the varying measure so peculiarly his own,—utterances of a feeling which in the end seems to have led him to forego his career as a poet: "The sea of faith," he plains,—
"Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."
Doubtless Arnold's reserve intensified this sadness. Clough equally felt the perturbed spirit of his time; but he had a refuge in a bracing zest for life and nature, which so often made the world seem good to him, and not designed for naught.
In time our poets will acquire, with the new learning and the more humane and critical The new day.theology, the health and optimism in which a note-
