reverence, and one of the most distinguished professors of the university is still wont to say that no man he has known at Oxford bore so clear a mark of genius as Clough. Personally, he became the object of devoted friendship. The mixture of power and tenderness, of thought and feeling, of upright honesty and diffidence, which marked his character, drew men towards him. He proved successful as a private "coach" and as a tutor in his college. But this fair state of things was not destined to last long. His position as the fellow and tutor of a great college brought him necessarily into close contact with many of the principles about which he had serious doubts. He was expected to teach and enforce what he could at most but half believe, and thus perpetually found himself in a false position. His own language illustrates the painfulness of this state: "If I begin to think about God," he writes, "there arise a thousand questions, and whether the Thirty-nine Articles answer them at all, or whether I should not answer them in the most diametrically opposite purport, is a matter of great doubt. If I am to study the question, I have no right to put my name to the answers beforehand, or to join in the acts of a body, and be to practical purposes one of a body, who accept these answers of which I propose to examine the validity." gressed. And though all kinds of moral and religious questions plagued his reason, he held fast to the belief that truth immut able abode behind the clouds, that God, the source of all good things, was cognizant of what we thought or did or said. The importance of such a faith as this will not be undervalued by any one who has observed the want of tone and moral helplessness to which mere scepticism leads; who has, for instance, compared the life of Clough with that of Alfred de Musset, a far greater artist, and a far less estimable man. "The New Sinai," "The Questioning Spirit," and the lines beginning "Whate'er when face to face we see," among Clough's poems, show the depth of these convictions in his soul. Such bitter pieces as "The Latest Decalogue," "There is no God the wicked saith," and "Easter Day," proved that his lack of definite beliefs did not spring from want of earnestness or thought, but that he had passed beyond the standing point of common orthodoxy without gaining ground sufficiently sure to base a new creed upon. "He would not make his reason blind," he could not solidify the prejudices of the mass, cry peace where there was no peace, or dishonestly acquiesce in certain formulas because the world at large expected it. The poem which begins "O thou whose image in the shrine of human spirits dwells divine," is a sufficiently clear expression of Here is a sorry pass for an earnest and the earnest, if sad and undefined, faith conscientious man who has signed the which he carried with him to the grave. It Thirty-nine Articles, and finds himself reputis this profound reverence, this courage, this ed by his colleagues and the world as one patience, this sincerity, this belief in the of their paid champions. Clough felt so unseen, this loyalty to duty, which we ad- hampered by his position at Oriel, that he mire in Clough, and which make the story decided, in 1848, to resign his tutorship: of his life instructive. We need these almost anything, he thought, was "honester qualities in the present day, when people than being a teacher of the Thirty-nine are too ready on the one hand to hoot down Articles." A few months later he resigned speculation and to stifle doubt, while others his fellowship and cut himself adrift from take a pride in rushing prematurely to Oxford. By this step he gained some freenegative conclusions. The perplexities of dom, but he lost pecuniary advantages of Clough's mind so far hindered his activity no slight importance, congenial occupations, that he was precluded from achieving all and the society of cultivated men the academical honours that were expected father had recently failed in business, so of him. Before leaving Rugby the compe- that this sudden renunciation of a lucrative tition for prizes and distinctions had lost and certain post made his relations not a for him the charm of novelty. His success little anxious. "They wrote 'kindly and at Balliol sufficed to increase his repu- temperately on the whole," he says, "made tation, but not to stimulate ambition. He the most of conscientiousness, but were took a second class in the final examinations, alarmed with ideas of extreme and extravaand after failing to obtain a fellowship in his own college, was elected fellow of Oriel in 1842. Among tutors and contemporaries his renown was great, far greater than his actual achievements warranted. Freshmen pointed out the grave and silent scholar, deep-voiced, broad-chested, with peculiar His gant views." To Clough himself the breaking of his fetters brought a sense of infinite relief. He spent the Easter vacation of 1848 at Paris, among the stirring scenes of revolutions and counter-revolutions. His letters at that time took a curiously Carlylesque tone, and it is clear that from the .... jumped over a ditch for the fun of the experiment, and would not be disinclined to be once more again in a highway, with my brethren and companions. But Spartam nactus es, hanc orna. .. Nothing is very good anywhere, I am afraid." Later on he said in the same strain, "I feel sometimes as if I must not trifle away time in anything which is not really a work to some purpose, and that any attempt to be happy, except in doing that, would be a mere failure, were it apparently successful. It sometimes seems to be said to me that I must do this, or else from him that hath not, shall he taken away even that which he seemeth to have.' There is nothing very terrible in this, but I cannot get myself to look at things as mere means to money-making; and yet if I do not, I seem in some sense guilty." The dramatic poem Dipsychus, written in 1850, shows how profoundly his whole mental constitution was divided and distracted by the sense of unaccomplishment and misdirected energies. Some of its lines are pointed to himself various activities around him he caught a utility of his own occupations. To one of spark of genuine enthusiasm. His gener- his friends he writes, "I, like you, have ous nature sympathized with every effort after freedom; and he almost won for himself the title of socialist, then dreaded with a superstitious terror, by the tirades which he delivered against "well-to-do-ism" and "aristocracies." This spirit prompted him to write at Oxford, in the spring of 1847, a pamphlet on the Duty of Retrenchment during the Great Irish Famine, in which he thus appeals to the students of the university: :-"O ye, born to be rich, or, at least born not to be poor; ye young men of Oxford, who gallop your horses over Bullingdon, and ventilate your fopperies arm-in-arm, up the High Street, abuse, if you will, to the full that other plea of the spirits or thoughtlessness of youth, but let me advise you to hesitate ere you venture the question, May I not do what I like with my own? ere you meddle with such edge tools as the subject of property." The poetical aspect of these sympathies, instead of the didactic or minatory, was set forth in his poem of The Bothie-a pleasant idyll of Oxford reading parties, written in the autumn of 1848. It is clear that a man of genius, so well provided with doubtful opinions on social, political, and religious questions, was not likely to keep quiet and at ease in the henroost of Oxford, where heterodoxies even of the retrograde and Romanizing order were regarded with great horror. In the beginning of 1849, Clough accepted the headship of University Hall, London. This institution was but just founded, and before it came into working order he had time to visit Rome, and be a witness of the extinction of Mazzini's republic. His letters from Rome are full of vigorous thought and graphic touches. It was during his detention in the beleagured city that he wrote the Amours de Voyage, which, perhaps, may be regarded as his most finished poem. The autumn found him established in Gordon Square, at the head of his hall, alone, and comparatively free. He had hoped for perfect liberty of thought and action; but this he could not find. In fact the whole of his life was destined to prove one perpetual hustling against orthodoxies at Oxford against the orthodoxy of the English Church-in London against the orthodoxy of heterodoxical opinions. in America against the orthodoxy of established Unitarians. The social problems which life in London forces upon a solitary man plagued him. He could not fix himself to money-making as the object of existence, and was always restless as to the Heartily you will not take to anything; .. Methinks I see you In fact Clough was one of those men who long for work, whose consciences oppress them if they rest a moment idle, but who cannot set their hands to anything which seems to them worth doing. They are too acutely critical to put their faith in the systems that satisfy other men, too scrupulous to let the question go unsolved, and use their energy in the pursuit of selfish aims. A church is the proper sphere for these men; that alone consecrates daily labour to spiritual ends, and relieves the zealous worker of importunate responsibility. But the time has long gone by since any church could satisfy the mind of such a man as Clough. His painful sensibility to all the puzzles of the world incapacitated him for useful labour even when he most desired it. Yet we must not fall into a one-sided view of Clough's character. He was not a sour misanthropist or gloomy dreamer. Much humour and interest in many subjects are shown in all his letters, and the creeds which supported his life were of a high and noble kind. Of religion he speaks thus, "My own feeling does not go along with Coleridge in attributing any special virtue to the facts of the Gospel History. They have happened, and have produced what we know have transformed the civilization of Greece and Rome and the bar barism of Gaul and Germany into Christendom. But I cannot feel sure that a man may not have all that is important in Christianity even if he does not so much as know that Jesus of Nazareth existed. And I do not think that doubts respecting the facts related in the Gospels need give us much trouble. Believing that in one way or other the thing is of God, we shall in the end know, perhaps, in what way, and how far it was so. Trust in God's justice and love, and belief in his commands as written in our conscience, stand unshaken, though Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or even St. Paul, were to fail. "The thing which men must work at will not be critical questions about the Scriptures, but philosophical problems of grace, and free will, and of redemption as an idea, not as an historical event. What is the meaning of Atonement by a Crucified Saviour?' How many of the Evangelicals can answer that?" There was even pain in relinquishing his old perplexities, or rather in carrying them away with him to new and less congenial scenes. Yet even Clough had reasons in the history of his own family, in his political sympathies, and in the friendship which he had formed for Emerson, to feel less doubtful about the advantages of expatriation than many were who seek their fortunes in the colonies. He travelled with Thackeray, and soon found himself in the society of Longfellow, Hawthorne, Channing, Theodore Parker, Dana, Lowell, and others. The Bothie, which suited American tastes, had gained for him a poet's reputation; and his sound scholarship secured him the certainty of work. After settling at Cambridge with the intention of making "pupillizing and writing" his vocation, he was forthwith engaged in teaching Greek to an American youth of seventeen years of age, and six feet one in height, and in preparing for the press a revised edition of Dryden's Plutarch. But he found it languid work. The novelty of American life wore off; the tyranny of fixed opinions made itself felt even in the United States, and Clough was glad enough to hear of a place in the Privy Council Office having been procured for him by friends. He returned to England in 1853, from which time, till his death in 1861, he led a uniform, hardworking, uneventful life. 1854 he married, and subsequently had two children, to whom he was most devotedly attached. The nature of his employment was on the whole satisfactory. "I am going on here, working in the office Come back; come back; and whither back or in the ordinary routine, which, however, And of his theory of life we hear, - "As for the objects of life, heaven knows! they differ with one's opportunities. (a.) Work for others political, mechanical, or as it may be. (b.) Personal relations. (c.) Making books, pictures, music, etc. (d.) Living in one's shell. They also serve who only stand and wait.'" There is nothing fanciful or trivial or selfish in either of these creeds. Insufficient as they may be to happiness, far as they may be from supplying a man less powerful than Clough with energy to battle in the world, they reveal to us the patience of a calm and philosophic mind. "If we die and come to nothing," he remarks, "it does not therefore follow that life and goodness will cease to be in heaven and earth." In this negative stoicism of a man defrauded of positive creeds and unwilling to relapse into selfish indifference there is something which moves admiration even more than pity in the midst of sadness. University Hall having proved a failure as far as Clough was concerned, he set out in 1852 to try his fortunes in the New World. What it cost him to leave England may easily be guessed and is pathetically expressed in the following stanzas of a poem written on the voyage: why? In after years of great tuition, is really a very poems and remains, may find it legible upon his written words. After writing many pieces in the Rugby Magazine, Clough began his career as a poet at Oxford by the publication of a little volume of fugitive pieces called Ambarvalia. He and his friend Burbidge brought it out conjointly in 1848. Shortly after this he wrote and printed The Bothie of Tober na Vuolich; at Rome, in 1849, he composed the Amours de Voyage, which were, however, not given to the world till 1858. In great relief. All education is in England, and I think in America, so mixed up with religious matters, that it is a great difficulty." Another time he says, in something of his old spirit, “Well, I go on in the office-operosè nihil agendo very operose, and very nihil, too." At the same time the society of eminent men, Carlyle and Tennyson and others, whose friendship he formed during the latter part of his life, the pretty regular correspondence which he kept up with his American acquaintances, his lively interest in home the following year he wrote Dipsychus and and foreign politics, and the reading of current literature, supplied his life with numerous and pleasant sources of occupation. His work was unintermitting in its energy. The condition of the educational department of the Privy Council Office at the time when his assistance was required, enabled him to exercise those administrative powers which he possessed so largely, and which had been so long dormant. He infused new life into the system. Nor was he content with his official labours, but continued to devote his spare time to conducting for Miss Nightingale the business connected with her Crimean expedition. Two years before his death his health began to waver. He visited Greece and Constantinople in the April of 1861, and in the summer of that year travelled in the Pyrenees. During these journeys he was alone; but in that summer Mrs. Clough joined him. They went together across the Alps to Florence, where his health gave way entirely beneath the attack of a malarious fever. He died on the 13th of November, in his forty-third year, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery just outside the Porta à Pinti. He lies not far from the graves of Walter Savage Landor, of Mrs. Barrett Browning, and of Theodore Parker, upon the slope beneath the cypress trees within view of "quiet pleasant Fiesole," a spot second only in beauty and interest to Shelley's grave beneath the walls of Rome. We cannot do better than echo the words of one of his biographers, who says, "This truly was a life of much performance, yet of more promise." During his two and forty years Clough did more than might have been expected from an average man; and none could have cavilled at the results of his life had it not been palpable from first to last that Clough was far above the ordinary height of men. This to those who knew him, was stamped on his face and form, on his actions, and on his expressed opinions, and we who only judge of him by Easter Day, the former at Venice, the latter at Naples. Thus all his principal poems were written before 1851, and all were localized, - Scotland, Rome, Venice, and Naples supplying the scenery of his four chief works. After 1850, his genius seemed to have fallen asleep, and it was not until the year of his death that it reappeared again in a wholly different kind of composition. Mari Magno, or Tales on Board, consists of three stories supposed to have been told on successive nights by fellow-travellers in an American steamer. They are written in the style of Crabbe, with some affectation of Crabbe's prosaic plainness, but more of delicacy than the poet of the borough ever showed. These tales have been regarded by some critics as a fallingoff from Clough's earlier productions, and an indication of failing strength others will see in them the resurrection of a true poetic genius in a new and healthier direction. As regards expression, concentration, and vigour of description, The Clergyman's Tale is superior to any of Clough's other works. We do not trace in it the painful intensity of Easter Day, but the subject is one that enlists the broadest human sympathies, and does not appeal merely to a passing phase in some distempered souls. Mari Magno might, in our opinion, be com pared to the fresh growth of young and vigorous shoots, which a tree puts forth when it has been relieved of withered or decaying branches. The speculations out of which Dipsychus, Easter Day, and Amours de Voyage were woven, interrupted the healthy development of Clough's genius. It was only when he absolutely abandoned them, and directed his poetic powers to subjects outside himself, and capable of true artistic treatment, that he won a place among the poets of the world. Death put a stop to the further expansion of a mind which showed so fair a promise of nobler and more enduring fruit. Fixing our attention upon the poems which survive, we notice that Clough's principal defect lay in We are most hopeless, who had once most And most beliefless, that had most believed. It is the one sad Gospel that is true- the power of expression. He did not use language with any facility, so that his words barely and unattractively clothe thoughts of great fertility and beauty. Even in his correspondence this is apparent. A certain meagreness and awkwardness of speech seems habitual to his style. In spite of this defect, however, which ought to have resulted in extreme concentration, he was he could set these milder meditations:frequently diffuse. It sometimes seemed as if he had a thought he could not seize, and wandered around it in a haze of barren words. Pages of Dipsychus will illustrate this criticism; they are tedious from their length and ambiguity, and want of ornament. On the other hand, whenever Clough felt intensely, and grasped a simple thought with mastery, his words are few, and fall like hammer-strokes. Nothing can be more impressive in its naked force than this from Easter Day: passage Nor afterwards, nor elsewhere, nor at all, - Sit if ye will, sit down upon the ground, around. Now too, as when it first began, For all that breathe beneath the heaven's Joy with grief mixes, with despondence hope. Christ is yet risen. If we seek to affiliate Clough to his legiti mate predecessors in English literature, we shall find that he descends lineally from Wordsworth. The two poets were alike Some words need to be said in explanation strong in their friendships, genial in their of these lines. Easter Day is to Clough's daily life, yet bitter and unsparing of their other poems what The Ode on the Intima- scorn where vice or folly called for hatred tions of Immortality is to Wordsworth's and contempt. They both belonged to volumes. It expresses with admirable con- that breed of plain livers and high thinkcentration the despair which he felt when ers, lovers and observers of nature in all he compared the promises of Christianity her moods, philosophical thinkers and libewith the guilt and misery of men; the bit-ral politicians, who form the flower of Engterness that filled his soul when he reflected lish literary men. How deeply Clough on the disappointment of long-cherished sympathized with the beauties of nature hopes, the death of ancient creeds, and the necessity of walking, unenlightened from above, in a dark, wicked world. It is a cry of want and pain wrung from the soul of one to whom belief is vital, but whom reason and reflection force to leave the trodden pathways of religious faith. Its tone of defiant bitterness is very characteristic of Clough. He was not wont, like Alfred de Musset, to pour out his anguish in eloquent apostrophes to the crucifix of happier and humbler creeds; he did not indulge in pathetic reminiscences; but he fixed his mind upon the realities of present experience, whether hard or soothing. By the side of despair, such as this, Eat, drink, and die, for we are souls bereaved: 1 may be seen in his poem of the Bothie. |