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Association with Matthew Arnold will always give a literary savour to the place. His special tree Survives ; and it is, I believe, the intention to pay some special attention to the flowers that find a place in The Scholar Gipsy and in Thyrsis. There may be two opinions about the place of Arnold among the poets. He was perhaps too classical, as well as too consciously intellectual to reach the very highest, though much of Oxford• would not perhaps agree ; but however this may be he was a supreme hiker, to use the idiom of the Philistine (whom he labelled and scorned). If any one, 'he knew a beautiful country when he saw it and had pene- trated the Jefferies' secret that you must always " get over a stile " to discover its inner beauties. Being an athlete -in that regard he would probably have jumped the stile. He is not a poet of Wordsworth's quality, but he knew and loved his Oxford country as well as Wordsworth his Lakes and was a good deal better as botanist. If we were to arrange the poets in order of merit as students of wild flowers I should think Matthew Arnold would come second—though at some remove—to Lord de Tabley. Robert Bridges describes his Berkshire, especially the Thames scenery, hardly less well than Arnold describes Oxford. None of them approaches the modern minor poet Ralph Hodgion as lover of birds.
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