The only part on which there may be some difference between admirers is the final simile of the Tyrian trader.  This finishes off the piece in nineteen lines, of which the poet was—­and justly—­proud, which are quite admirable by themselves, but which cannot perhaps produce any very clear evidences of right to be where they are.  No ingenuity can work out the parallel between the “uncloudedly joyous” scholar who is bid avoid the palsied, diseased enfants du siecle, and the grave Tyrian who was indignant at the competition of the merry Greek, and shook out more sail to seek fresh markets.  It is, once more, simply an instance of Mr Arnold’s fancy for an end-note of relief, of cheer, of pleasant contrast.  On his own most rigid principles, I fear it would have to go as a mere sewn-on patch of purple:  on mine, I welcome it as one of the most engaging passages of a poem delightful throughout, and at its very best the equal of anything that was written in its author’s lifetime, fertile as that was in poetry.

He himself, though he was but just over thirty when this poem appeared, and though his life was to last for a longer period than had passed since his birth to 1853, was to make few further contributions to poetry itself.  The reasons of this comparative sterility are interesting, and not quite so obvious as they may appear.  It is true, indeed,—­it is an arch-truth which has been too rarely recognised,—­that something like complete idleness, or at any rate complete freedom from regular mental occupation, is necessary to the man who is to do poetic work great in quality and in quantity at once.  The hardest occupation—­and Mr Arnold’s, though hard, was not exactly that—­will indeed leave a man sufficient time, so far as mere time is concerned, to turn out as much verse as the most fertile of poets has ever produced.  But then that will scarcely do.  The Muses are feminine—­and it has been observed that you cannot make up even to the most amiable and reasonable of that sex for refusing to attend to her at the minute when she wants you, by devoting even hours, even days, when you are at leisure for her.  To put the thing more seriously, though perhaps not more truly, the human brain is not so constituted that you can ride or drive or “train” from school to school, examining as you go, for half-a-dozen or half-a-score hours a-day, or that you can devote the same time to the weariest and dreariest of all businesses, the reading of hundreds of all but identical answers to the same stock questions, and yet be fresh and fertile for imaginative composition.  The nearest contradictory instances to this proposition are those of Scott and Southey, and they are, in more ways than one or two, very damaging instances—­exceptions which, in a rather horrible manner, do prove the rule.  To less harassing, and especially less peremptory, work than Mr Arnold’s, as well as far more literary in kind, Scott sacrificed the minor literary graces, Southey immolated the choicer fruits of genius which he undoubtedly possessed the power of producing; and both “died from the top downward.”