Chambers's cyclopaedia of English literature : a history critical and biographical of authors in the English tongue from the earliest times till the present day, with specimens of their writing . rilliancies and beauties. The most remarkablenew poems were the epic episode Sohrab andRustum, derived from Ferdusis Shah-Nameh,and the beautiful Scholar-Gipsy, suggested byGlanvills story of an Oxford student who quittedhis studies to join himself to the crew of outlandishwanderers. The landscape of Oxfordshire and of 592 Matthew Arnold the Thames valley is rendered in the latter ofthese poems with e
Chambers's cyclopaedia of English literature : a history critical and biographical of authors in the English tongue from the earliest times till the present day, with specimens of their writing . rilliancies and beauties. The most remarkablenew poems were the epic episode Sohrab andRustum, derived from Ferdusis Shah-Nameh,and the beautiful Scholar-Gipsy, suggested byGlanvills story of an Oxford student who quittedhis studies to join himself to the crew of outlandishwanderers. The landscape of Oxfordshire and of 592 Matthew Arnold the Thames valley is rendered in the latter ofthese poems with exquisite feeling. Sohrab andRustum, the story of a great chieftain who slayshis son in single combat, each unknown to theother until the fatal wound has been given, iswritten in blank verse of sustained dignity, and isinspired by a passionate pathos, rare in this pas-sionate quality among the poems of Arnold. Ina second series of Poems, published in 1855, ^^isincluded an epic treatment of a fragment of Norsemytholog), Balder Dead. Balder, beloved of thegods, has been undesignedly slain by the blindHoder ; the adventurous efforts to recover Balderfrom the realm of the dead make up the main. MATTIIEW ARNOLD. From the Portrait by G. F. Watts, (Fied Hollyer, Photo.) part of the narrative. It was impossible to givethe subject, which strains the power of imaginativebelief without always supporting it, an interestequal to that of Sohrab and Rustum. After his thirty-third year Arnolds stream ofpoetry, from the first pure rather than affluent,dwindled ; but in Merope (1858) he made a sus-tained and deliberate effort, which in its designwas admirable. His purpose, as he tells his readerin an interesting preface, was to try how much ofthe effectiveness of the poetic:al forms of Greektragedy he could retain in an English poem con-structed under the conditions of those forms. Thestoiy of Merope was not ill chosen ; it had beenhandled in drama by Maffei and by Alfieri in Italy,by Voltair
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectenglish, bookyear1901
