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Four Victorian Poets

passage of love in his life when he loved for a time a daughter of France who lived in Switzerland, or whether he invented the subject in order to write on the matter of a love-passion which was born, lived for a time and died, in a heart too restless, too untamed, too feverish with the trouble of the world, too unable to forget itself, for unforgetful happiness in another. I do not like to think that the subject was invented, but there are passages—it may be they were added afterwards—which are chill with that intellectual or moral analysis both of which are apart from love in its passionate mood. On the other hand, if anywhere in Arnold's poetry there is youthful passion, it is here.

They begin with a poem of the first volume, 1849, A Memory Picture, and record his first meeting and parting with Marguerite. It ought to have been collected with the others. The poems of 1852 record the progress of this love affair. Three years had not dimmed his occasional passion for this girl; and they close with a poem written ten years afterwards, in which he remembers her, and wonders where she is, as he muses on the terrace at Berne.

The second in the series as finally brought together, entitled Parting, is the most interesting. Like Goethe, when he fled from his slavery to Lili—and Arnold imitates here the motive of Goethe's poem—he calls on the mountains to receive him and release him from the storm of love; but the vision of Marguerite, passing to