Description: In this penultimate volume of the Virginia edition of Matthew Arnold's letters, we see Arnold at his best. This period saw publication of Mixed Essays, Irish Essays, and Discourses in America as well as of several essays gathered later in Essays in Criticism, Second Series. The Poems of Wordsworth and The Poetry of Byron appeared, as did the controversial essay "The Study of Poetry", with its notorious and very readable touchstone theory.

The emotional and moral center of the volume, however, is the extraordinary series of letters written during Arnold's first American visit, during which he ranged from New York and New England to Madison, Chicago, Richmond, Washington, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec. Like most visiting British luminaries, he meets everyone everywhere, including the president and former president, the Delanos, the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts, and, especially, Andrew Carnegie. But the visit -- a lecture tour undertaken to pay off his son's debts -- had other and far more significant repercussions, for Arnold was accompanied by his wife and by his elder daughter, who met the man she was to marry -- the direct cause of a second American visit and, in due course, of a flourishing branch of Arnold descendants in the United States.

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