"Ay, in the very temple of delight
             Veil'd Melancholy has her Sovran shrine,
             Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
             Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
             His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
             And be among her cloudy trophies hung."
             To think of Matthew Arnold is at once to think of his elegiac or melancholy mood. Indeed, Arnold was among the "cloudy trophies" of goddess Melancholy; his acute perception that the beauty of an age gradually dying under the constant pressure of materialism rendered him permanently melancholy. The chief characteristic features of his poetry are s spirit of high seriousness and an elegiac and reflective melancholy strain. "Nothing in Arnold's verse" says Hugh Walker "is more arresting than its elegiac element. It is not too much to say there is no other English poet in whom the elegiac spirit so reigns as it does in him. He found in the elegy the outlet of his native melancholy of the 'Virgilian cry' over the mournfulness of moral-destiny." Other poets like Milton, Gray, Shelley, Tennyson had given expression to their sorrow in single elegies, but no one else had used the elegiac form so frequently as Arnold.
             Most of Arnold's poems are efflorescence of melancholy strain. As a poet he gives vent to the essentially modern theme of the separation and loneliness of the individual. Separation from God, from Nature, from other men and separation of man from his true, inner self loom large in his poems. It is not the joy and companionship of lovers coming together, which Arnold expresses, but the failures, the partings, and the incapacity of human beings to understand each other. Consequently, there hangs an air of melancholy, a sense of loneliness and of quiet desperation. So "the instrument on which he (Arnold) plays is like a violin played by a regretful artist in a lonely room." But th...