own; while the grandeur of the effect is heightened by the Rembrandt-like contrast of light and shadow. In the later prophecies of Isaiah, generally attributed by modern critics to a later prophet,-and the great poem of Job, this startling narrowness and intensity of effect is visibly on the decline. The clouds of Omnipotence begin to break; the intrinsic beauty of Nature begins to be more closely associated with the spiritual lights of heaven, and humanity especially to have a distinct standing point and radiance of its own. From this time the marvellously unique poetry of Israel ceases, and ceases never to be revived. But the supernaturalism which it discerned so vividly as brooding over the early world does not cease with it. It has transmuted for ever the pure naturalism of Greek poetry. And now no modern poet can ever become really great, who does not feel and reproduce in his writings the characteristic difference between that mild inner light which "lightens every man that cometh into the world," which grows with our growth and strengthens with our strength, and that which, descending suddenly from God upon the startled conscience, makes us exclaim: "How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God; this is the gate of heaven." VI ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 1 THESE two volumes, as they now stand, contain as adequate a picture of the singular but large, simple, and tender nature of the Oxford poet as is attainable, and it is one which no one can study without much profit, and perhaps also some loss; without feeling the high exaltation of true poetry and the keen pleasure caused by the subtlety of true scholarship, at every turn; nor also without feeling now and again those "blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realised," which are scattered so liberally among these buoyant ardours, disappointed longings, and moods of speculative suspense, and which characterise these singular letters of reticent tenderness and rough self-satire. Every one who knew Clough even slightly, received the strongest impression of the unusual breadth and massiveness of his mind. Singularly simple and genial, he was unfortunately cast upon a self-questioning age, which led him to worry himself with constantly testing the veracity of his own emotions. He has delineated in four lines the impression which his 1 The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, with a Selection from his Letters, and a Memoir. Edited by his Wife. 2 vols. With a Portrait. Macmillan. habitual reluctance to converse on the deeper themes of life made upon those of his friends who were attracted by his frank simplicity. In one of his shorter poems he writes "I said my heart is all too soft; This expresses the man in a very remarkable manner. He had a kind of proud simplicity about him, singularly attractive, and often singularly disappointing to those who longed to know him well. He had a fear, which many would think morbid, of leaning much on the approbation of the world; and there is one characteristic passage in his poems, in which he intimates that men who lean on the good opinion of others might even be benefited by a crime which would rob them of that evil stimulant : "Why so is good no longer good, but crime Where He again is visible, though in anger." So eager was his craving for reality and perfect sincerity, so morbid his dislike even for the unreal conventional forms of life, that a mind quite unique in simplicity and truthfulness represents itself in his poems as Seeking in vain, in all my store, Indeed, he wanted to reach some guarantee for simplicity deeper than simplicity itself. I remember his principal criticism on America, after returning from his residence in Massachusetts, was that the New Englanders were much simpler than the English, and that this was the great charm of New England society. His own habits were of the same kind,sometimes almost austere in their simplicity. Luxury he disliked, and at times his friends thought him even ascetic. This almost morbid craving for a firm base on the absolute realities of life was very wearying to a mind so self-conscious as Clough's, and tended to paralyse the expression of a certainly great genius. As a rule, his lyrical poems fall short of complete success in delineating the mood which they are really meant to delineate, owing to this chronic state of introspective criticism on himself in which he is apt to write, and which, characteristic as it is, necessarily diminishes the linearity and directness of the feeling expressed, refracting it, as it were, through media of very variable density. As he himself, no doubt in this stanza delineating himself,—says of one of his heroes in "the Clergyman's first tale":— "With all his eager motions still there went A self-correcting and ascetic bent, That from the obvious good still led astray, And in the same poem there are descriptive touches which very skilfully portray the nature of those dispersive influences, as I may call them, in his character, which, while they may injure his lyrical, add a great wealth of criticism to his speculative and disquisitional poems :— "Beside the wishing-gate, which so they name 'Would I could wish my wishes all to rest, Far off, and leave me of myself aware!'". That is clearly self-portraiture, and it describes an element in Clough's nature which, no doubt, contributed greatly to diminish the number of his few but exquisite lyrical poems, and sometimes to confine even those to the delineation of feelings of a certain vagueness of drift. Yet there was, besides this most subtle and almost over-perfect intellectual culture in Clough, much of a boyish, half-formed nature in him, even to the last; and this, when fully roused, contributed a great deal of the animation, and, when least roused, contributed not a little of the embarrassed, shy, half-articulate tone to some of the most critical passages of his finest poems. He describes this side of boyish feeling admirably in one of his In Mari Magno tales : "How ill our boyhood understands L Incipient manhood's strong demands ! U |