nothing but tossing to and fro. Even when he falls back on duty, a voice in his heart tells him it is not enough. He must find the unknown Perfect his soul desires. At last, he is enraged with his condition. Life is slipping away in overthinking, in this way and that dividing the swift mind. The soul, while he is young, is growing old in a diseased confusion. Is this life, he asks, this the end of our stay on earth? PERCHÈ PENSA? PENSANDO S'INVECCHIA To spend uncounted years of pain, And purpose of our being here ? There are those who are not troubled by any such questions, simple folk who believe and have peace, and Clough praises their life and thinks them true and happy; at moments he can feel with them, but not for long. There are others who find peace and power to live and work by giving up all questions of this kind as hampering life and useless for good. But Clough was not of that temper, and could not enter its regions. He did his duty, but a tender intensity of passion urged him beyond it to find the rest in perfection. He was the image and the expression of thousands who lived in that disturbed time, when criticism and science set the battle in array against the old theology. It is the image and the expression, even now, after the battle has raged for sixty years, of the condition of a number of persons who are impassioned to find a truth by which they can live, who desire to believe but are unable, who are equally unable to find peace in unbelief. Thus moving, like a Hamlet, through the strifes of theology and religion, he resembles Hamlet in another way. When the Prince is suddenly flung into the storm of action, he takes momentarily a fierce part in it, and enjoys it, till overthinking again seizes on him. Clough repeats this in his life, and his poetry is touched with it. These are the causes of the pleasure with which we read Clough's earlier poetry-its clear image of a certain type of men and women in a spiritually troubled time, its close contact with and intimate expression of the constantly debating soul, its truthfulness, its sanity amid scepticism, its statement of all sides of the matter in hand, its personal humanity, and its sympathy with man, its self-mastery and its clear aim. There is also plenty of good matter of thought and of emotion worthily controlled-great things in poetry, provided they are expressed poetically. But the poetry itself is not of a high quality; its level is only a third of the way towards greatness; it is imaginative, but the imagination in it never soars and never is on fire, never at a white heat; on the contrary, its play is gentle, soft, touched, like an autumn evening when summer has just died, with tender, clear, brooding light. The greater number of these poems are such as a man who lived in a constant atmosphere of trouble and battle might write, when, wearied with the strife, he enjoyed an hour of forgetful rest after trouble, and of sheathing of the sword after battle; and I do not know of any other poet of whom this may be said so truly. In that he is alone-that is the distinction of these early poems. And this clear, soft, brooding note is just as clearly struck in the poems which have nothing to do with the trouble of the soul, but with matter of the affections. I quote this little idyll: how grave it is, and tender; what an evening light rests upon it; not the light of Italy, but of the northern sky among the mountains. What self-control breathes in it; what a quiet heart, quiet, not by the absence of passion, but by self-restraint, and by that on which Clough so often dwelt and which subdued his poetry so often-by the sense of the inevitable, of a fate which, hemming us in on every side, imposes on us its will, and ignores our struggle and our pain: ITE DOMUM SATURÆ, VENIT HESPERUS The skies have sunk, and tied the upper snow, And wet will be the path, and wet shall we. Like I Ah dear, and where is he, a year agone, Who stepped beside and cheered us on and on? Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie. The lightning zigzags shoot across the sky, The thunder bellows far from snow to snow, Or shall he find before his term be sped, Or may it be that I shall find my mate, The sky behind is brightening up anew, (Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie.) In Rose, and in Provence, and La Palie. There may be, he thinks, inevitable partings, however true men and women be to one another. Life moves us to an end of which we know nothing, which we cannot master. This is a favourite motive of his, as indeed it was of Matthew Arnold. They must have discussed it a hundred times at Oxford. We may exercise our will on circumstance, but it is of no avail. We try, and try again and yet again, but a little thing, of which we take no note, turns us from the goal. At last we grow wearied of being baffled, and give up the thing we desired; and then, in the hour when we have released ourselves from pursuing, we wonder, as we look back, whether we really cared for the thing we pursued, or whether the person we pursued cared for us. A series of slight pressures of circumstance on a dreamy and sensitive soul drifts the will away from its desired goal, and each of the drifts is accepted. Clough must have felt that this was the position of a part of his soul, perhaps with regard to matters of thought, certainly so far as the affections were concerned; or, if that is assuming too much, he must at least have sympathised keenly with this position in others. At any rate, he knew all about it. It is a frequent motive in his poems, and one whole poem, |