Matthew Arnold is in general so confidently clear as to the nature of his own poetry that the reader is apt to credit him when he insists upon the contemporary sources of its melancholy. But those contemporary sources will appear much dimmer when the second or third centenary of his birth (December 24, 1822) shall come round. The “two worlds” that the poet wandered between will doubtless be rather nebular on the rear horizon, and the carefully wrought stanzas concerning them may seem the “stretched metre of an antique song.” The cursory commemorating reader, when he reaches the poem on Growing Old, may toss the volume aside with the remark that “this old fellow carefully architectured his gloom, but added here too obvious a gable.” The discerning reader, however, will be in a better position than now to find, flowing beneath Arnold's verse, a profounder melancholy than the clear Arnoldian eye itself could fathom.