Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee, No later light has lightened up my heaven, But, when the days of golden dreams had perished, Then did I check the tears of useless passion- And, even yet, I dare not let it languish, THE OLD STOIC. Riches I hold in light esteem, And if I pray, the only prayer Is, 'Leave the heart that now I bear, Yes, as my swift days near their goal, 'Tis all that I implore; In life and death, a chainless soul, With courage to endure. A DEATH-SCENE. 'O Day! he cannot die When thou so fair art shining! He cannot leave thee now, While fresh west winds are blowing, Edward, awake, awake— The golden evening gleams Warm and bright on Arden's lake Arouse thee from thy dreams! Beside thee, on my knee, My dearest friend, I pray That thou, to cross the eternal sea, I hear its billows roar I see them foaming high; But no glimpse of a further shore Has blest my straining eye. Believe not what they urge Of Eden isles beyond; Turn back, from that tempestuous surge, To thy own native land. It is not death, but pain That struggles in thy breast Nay, rally, Edward, rouse again; I cannot let thee rest!' One long look, that sore reproved me One mute look of suffering moved me To repent my useless prayer: And, with sudden check, the heaving Not a sign of further grieving Paled, at length, the sweet sun setting; Then his eyes began to weary, But they wept not, but they changed not, So I knew that he was dying- ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. [BORN at Liverpool, Jan. 1, 1819; passed some years of his childhood at Charleston, in Virginia; was at school at Rugby from 1829 to 1837; was Scholar of Balliol and afterwards Fellow and Tutor of Oriel; resigned his offices in Oxford in 1848; was Principal of University Hall, London, for a short time afterwards; again went to America; returned in 1853 to take a post in the Education Office. He died at Florence, Nov. 13, 1861. His poems were chiefly written between 1840 and 1850, The Bothie being published in 1848, and many of the shorter poems appearing in a volume called Ambarvalia in the next year.] 'We have a foreboding,' says Mr. Lowell in one of his essays, 'that Clough, imperfect as he was in many respects, and dying before he had subdued his sensitive temperament to the sterner requirements of his art, will be thought a hundred years hence to have been the truest expression in verse of the moral and intellectual tendencies, the doubt and struggle towards settled convictions, of the period in which he lived.' If doubt and struggle were the ruling tendencies of Clough's time, this lofty estimate may well be true; for in no writer of that day are they more vividly reflected. They are the very substance of his verse, they give it strength, they impose upon it the limitations from which it suffers. Clough has never been a popular poet, and it may be doubted if he ever will be. His poetry has too much of the element of conflict, too much uncertainty, ever to become what the best of it ought to become, a household word. But from beginning to end it exhibits that devotion to truth which was in a special degree the characteristic of the finer minds of his epoch; a devotion which in his case was fostered by his early training under Arnold at Rugby, and by the atmosphere of theological controversy in which he found himself at Oxford. The warmth of his feelings, the width of his sympathies, the fineness of his physical sensibilities, made him a poet rather than a writer of prose treatises; but the other element, that element of impassioned search for reality, gives his poems their distinctive quality—namely, an air of strenuous mental effort which is almost greater than verse can bear. Clough was a philosophic poet in a sense in which no man since Lucretius has been so '.' This judgment, the judgment of a very competent critic, is at first unpalatable; one is not used to this matching of the men of our own time, and the men who are not among the most famous, with the giants of antiquity. The comparison however is no mere phrase. 'These two men were philosophers, not from the desire of fame, not from the pleasure of intellectual discovery, not because they hoped that philosophy would suggest thoughts that would soothe some private grief of their own, but because it was to them an overpowering interest to have some key to the universe, because all even of their desires were suspected by them until they could find some central desire on which to link the rest; and love and beauty, and the animation of life, were no pleasure to them, except as testifying to that something beyond of which they were in search.' The unlikeness between the two poets is far more apparent than the likeness; for Lucretius has found his solution of the puzzle of existence, and Clough has not; the ancient poet believes that he has reached the point at which all contradictions are harmonised, the modern poet is sure that he has done nothing of the kind. But in this they are one, that both are philosophic, are 'lovers of the knowledge which reveals to them real existence,' are content with nothing less. A reader of Clough's poetry, marked as so much of it is by indecision and manifoldness of view, is startled when he comes upon such passages as these from his American letters 'I think I must have been getting into a little mysticism lately. It won't do: twice two are four, all the world over, and there's no harm in its being so; 'tisn't the devil's doing that it is; il faut s'y soumettre, and all right.' And again 'What I mean by mysticism, is letting feelings run on without thinking of the reality of their object, letting them out merely like water. The plain rule in all matters is, not to think what you are thinking about the question, but to look straight out at the things and let them affect you; otherwise how can you judge at all? look at them at any rate, and judge while looking.' 1 Quarterly Review, April 1869. |