ARNOLD MAT ATTHEW ARNOLD, a distinguished English essayist and poet, was born at Laleham, near Staines, January 24, 1822. He was the oldest son of Dr. Thomas Arnold, of Rugby. He was educated at Winchester, Rugby (where he won the Rugby prize poem), and Balliol College, Oxford (where he won the Newdigate prize). He graduated with distinguished honors in 1844, and was elected a fellow of Oriel. For four years he served as private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, and in 1851 was appointed lay inspector of schools, a thankless and onerous office, which he filled with conscientious fidelity for thirty-five years. He was several times sent by his government to inquire into the state of education in France, Holland, and Germany, and his reports, full of keen observations, pregnant suggestions, and trenchant criticisms, attracted wide attention. In 1857 he was made professor of poetry at Oxford, and his lectures on the translation of Homer and other topics are among the classics of literary criticism. He held his Oxford professorship for ten years. In 1883 a pension of £250 was conferred on him, and he came to America to lecture. His death occurred April 18, 1888, at Liverpool, where he had gone to meet his daughter, who had married an American. Outwardly somewhat cold and formal, he is shown by his letters and the testimony of his friends to have been one of the most gentle and lovable of men. He was animated by noble ideals and faithful to the guiding light of a broad and liberal religious philosophy. As a poet he is more and more recognized as one of the chief galaxy of the Victorian age. As a critic he has been called the Sainte-Beuve of English letters and many of his felicitous phrases have become current quotations. His works are comprised in about forty volumes, including "Poems" (1853-4); Essays in Criticism (1865); Lectures on the Study of Celtic Literature" and "New Poems " (1867); Culture and Anarchy (1869); "St. Paul and Protestantism " (1870); "Literature and Dogma " (1872); "Discourses on America (1885). 66 F LECTURE ON EMERSON ORTY years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in the air there which haunt my memory still. Happy the man who in that susceptible season of youth hears such voices! they are a possession to him forever. No such voices as those which we heard in our youth at Oxford are sounding there now. Oxford has more criti cism now, more knowledge, more light; but such voices as those of our youth it has no longer. The name of Cardinal Newman is a great name to the imagination still; his genius and his style are still things of power. But he is over eighty years old; he is in the Oratory at Birmingham; he has adopted, for the doubts and difficulties which beset men's minds to-day, a solution which, to speak frankly, is impossible. Forty years ago he was in the very prime of life; he was close at hand to us at Oxford; he was preaching in St. Mary's pulpit every Sunday; he seemed about to transform and to renew what was for us the most national and natural institution in the world, the Church of England. Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music,- subtle, sweet, mournful? I seem to hear him still, saying: "After the fever of life, after wearinesses and sicknesses, fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness, struggling and succeeding; after all the changes and chances of this troubled, unhealthy state, at length comes death, at length the white throne of God, at length the beatific vision.” Or, if we followed him back to his seclusion at Littlemore, that dreary village by the London road, and to the house of retreat and the church which he built there, a mean house such as Paul might have lived in when he was tent-making at Ephesus, a church plain and thinly sown with worshippers,— who could resist him there either, welcoming back to the severe joys of church fellowship, and of daily worship and prayer, the firstlings of a generation which had well-nigh forgotten them? Again I seem to hear him: "The season is chill and dark, and the breath of the morning is damp, and worshippers are few; but all this befits those who are by their profession penitents and mourners, watchers and pilgrims. More dear to them that loneliness, more cheerful that severity, and more bright that gloom, than all those aids and appliances of luxury by which men nowadays attempt to make prayer less disagreeable to them. True faith does not covet comforts; they who realize that awful day, when they shall see him face to face whose eyes are as a flame of fire, will as little bargain to pray pleasantly now as they will think of doing so then." Somewhere or other I have spoken of those "last en ntments of the Middle Age" which Oxford sheds around us, and here they were! But there were other voices sounding in our ear besides Newman's. There was the puissant voice of Carlyle; so sorely strained, over-used, and mis-used since, but then fresh, comparatively sound, and reaching our hearts with true, pathetic eloquence. Who can forget the emotion of receiving in its first freshness such a sentence as that sentence of Carlyle upon Edward Irving, then just dead: "Scotland sent him forth a herculean man, our mad Babylon wore and wasted him with all her engines, and it took her twelve years!" A greater voice still, the greatest voice of the century, came to us in those youthful years through Carlyle: the voice of Goethe. To this day,— such is the force of youthful associations,-I read the "Wilhelm Meister" with more pleasure in Carlyle's translation than in the original. The large, liberal view of human life in " Wilhelm Meister," how novel it was to the Englishman in those days! and it was salutary, too, and educative for him, doubtless, as well as novel. But what moved us most in "Wilhelm Meister was that which, after all, will always move the young most, the poetry, the eloquence. the eloquence. Never, surely, was Carlyle's prose so beautiful and pure as in his rendering of the Youths' dirge over Mignon! "Well is our treasure now laid up, he fair image of the past. Here sleeps it in the marble, undecaying; in your hearts, also, it lives, it works. Travel, travel, back into life! Take along with you this holy earnestness, for earnestness alone makes life eternity." Here we had the voice of the great Goethe; - not the stiff, and hindered, and frigid, and factitious Goethe who speaks to us too often from those sixty volumes of his, but of the great Goethe, and the true one. And besides those voices, there came to us in that old Oxford time a voice also from this side of the Atlantic,— a clear and pure voice, which for my ear, at any rate, brought a strain as new, and moving, and unforgetable, as the strain of Newman, or Carlyle, or Goethe. Mr. Lowell has well described the apparition of Emerson to your young generation here, in that distant time of which I am speaking, and of his workings upon them. He was your Newman, your man of soul and genius visible to you in the flesh, speaking to your bodily ears, a present object for your heart and imagination. That is surely the most potent of all influences! nothing can come up to it. To us at Oxford Emerson was but a voice speaking from three thousand miles away. But so well he spoke,. that from that time forth Boston Bay and Concord were names invested to my ear with a sentiment akin to that which invests for me the names of Oxford and of Weimar; and snatches of Emerson's strain fixed themselves in my mind as imperishably as any of the eloquent words which I have been just now quoting. "Then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men.” "What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has |