Equally touching is his sweet poem on Geist, the Dachshund, the pet of the family for four years.

Yes; only four! and not the course

Of all the centuries yet to come

Can ever quite repeat

the past

Or just thy little self restore.

How lovingly Arnold dwells on this little dog's affectionate, winning ways, his liquid eyes, his broad brown paws, the flaps of his large ears, his keen intelligence, and how sincerely he mourns the loss of a real friend as he lays his canine companion in the stone-marked grave!

We lay thee, close within our reach,

Here, where the grass is smooth and warm,

Between the holly and the beech,

Where oft we watch'd thy couchant form

Asleep, yet lending half an ear

To travellers on the Portsmouth road ;—
There build we thee, O guardian dear,

Mark'd with a stone, thy last abode !

Arnold would seem to have been a second Walter Scott in his love of dogs. What can be finer than his picture of the lost collie, who has come on market-day to town with his master, but has parted company with him in the crowded streets, and wears himself out running hither and thither looking for his owner? It is a touching passage, and graphically true to life.

Like as a farmer who hath lost his dog
Some morn at market in a crowded town-
Through many streets the poor beast runs in vain,
And follows this man after that for hours;
And late at evening, spent and panting, falls
Before a stranger's threshold, not his home,
With flanks a-tremble, and his slender tongue
Hangs quivering out between his dust-smeared jaws,
And piteously he eyes the passers-by;

But home his master comes to his own farm,
Far in the country, wondering where he is.

Besides Geist's Grave Arnold has another poem devoted to praise of a dog-Kaiser Dead. This is in a more facetious vein, "a plain stave," as suiting the subject, for Kaiser was a deception, notwithstanding his imperial cognomen. Bought as a

Dachshund, which his mother certainly was, this dog, as he grew up from puppyhood, began to disclose a collie ancestry, evidenced by his restless eye and his curling tail, but he was a faithful and affectionate friend for all his mongrel blood, and the poet's delineation of him is very effective, although it does not move to tears as the recital of Geist's virtues does.

Soon, soon the days conviction bring :
The collie hair, the collie swing,

The tail's indomitable ring,

The eye's unrest—

The case was clear; a mongrel thing
Kai stood confest.

Thine eye was bright, thy coat it shone ;
Thou hadst thine errands off and on ;
In joy thy last morn flew; anon

A fit! all's over;

And thou art gone where Geist hath gone,
And Toss and Rover.

He loved

Such is Nature in Matthew Arnold. her well, and the contemplation of her ways brightened his life, and partly reconciled him to face the pessimism which he found in man's earthly lot. He hesitated as to the certainty of a future life; he therefore strove to take as much real joy from the present as he could. What he put into

the mouth of Empedocles, just before the final plunge into Etna's crater, might have been his own personal utterance.

Is it so small a thing

To have enjoy'd the sun,

To have lived light in the spring,

To have loved, to have thought, to have done;

To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes

That we must feign a bliss

Of doubtful future date,

And while we dream on this,

Lose all our present state,

And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?

CHAPTER IX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL AS NATURALIST

APART from his Biglow Papers, the caustic wit and keen satire of which are well known to English readers, this American author's poetry has not received the recognition it deserves. Although a poet of genuine quality, and one who gave utterance to many felicitous and original lines, he suffers from a general verbosity and diffuseness and lack of proportion. Perhaps he wrote too much; at all events it is certain that when he hit upon a good subject he often marred his treatment of it by over-elaborate introduction. He dallied too long in the entry. He had not learned that in poetry the half is greater than the whole. He once wrote: "One word with blood in't 's twice ez good ez two," but he sometimes forgets his own dictum. Endowed with phenomenal fluency and great skill in rhyming, he could spin verses by the yard. He is therefore apt to go on spinning long