And neither hope nor steadfast promise yield
In these usurping times of fear and pain?
Such doom awaits us. Nay, forbid it, Heaven!
We know the arduous strife, the eternal laws
To which the triumph of all good is given,
High sacrifice, and labour without pause,
Even to the death :-else wherefore should the eye
Of man converse with immortality ?

Was he who strove thus to call Robert Haydon to a sense of the responsibility of art, merely mooning his time away in rustic self-indulgence? Listen to his counsel to that wayward painter:

High is our calling, friend!-Creative art
(Whether the instrument of words she use,
Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues),
Demands the service of a mind and heart,
Though sensitive, yet, in their weakest part,
Heroically fashioned-to infuse

Faith in the whispers of the lonely muse,

While the whole world seems adverse to desert.
And oh! when nature sinks, as oft she may,
Through long-lived pressure of obscure distress,
Still to be strenuous for the bright reward,
And in the soul admit of no decay,

Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness;
Great is the glory, for the strife is hard!

Do you not hear the solemn roll of the drum summoning to battle in this patriotcall?

It is not to be thought of that the flood
Of British freedom, which, to the open sea
Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flowed," with pomp of waters unwithstood,"
Roused though it be full often to a mood

THE ODE TO DUTY.

41

Which spurns the check of salutary bands,
That this most famous stream in bogs and sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good

Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake: the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung
Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold.

Add to sonnets such as these the mighty trumpet-call that pealed from the hills encircling Grasmere in the incomparable "Ode to Duty," and you have your answer ready, and more than ready, for him who lays against Wordsworth the indictment that he mused the years away in idle meditation instead of doing his stroke for the reinforcement of the powers of righteousness in the world of men.

Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood," held by many to be the sublimest Ode in our tongue, if not the sublimest ever written, I pass by, because I am wholly unable to accept its philosophy of a preexistence which has left dim memories in the soul of the little child. I rather hold that the imperious instinct of immortality in the breast of Wordsworth was the source of this fanciful philosophy, than that the philosophy was the root of the belief.

I must draw to a close. Let me follow the high authority of Stopford Brooke in

summing up what Wordsworth had to teach.

He taught, first, the unity of humanity. There is the same God over the Idiot Boy as over Plato or St. Paul. The same heart is in the simplest as the noblest. And so the theology which divides men into two camps for one of which God cares, while for the other He cares not, is stricken at its roots.

He tolerates no longer the idea of God as a Creator outside Nature, but sees the Divine Energy and Love in every throbbing fibre of the universe, and so anticipates that transcendental theology which, after so many doubts, is just beginning to beat its music out.

He thinks of God as conscious of Himself "at every point of nature's being," and also in nature as a whole.

And as he also thinks of God as realising a personality in every human being, he conceives and declares a sympathy of thought, of mood, of feeling between nature and man which has its roots in the very essence of things, and so makes nature the great revealer to man both of his own inmost self and of the eternal God. It is a mystic Gospel, but one that has inspiration and strength and joy and peace unspeakable for every soul that, through humility, truthfulness, and reverence, can attain to it and hold it.

ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH:

BETWEEN THE OLD FAITH AND THE NEW.

ON New Year's Day, 1819, three years before the death of Shelley, and when Wordsworth was nearly fifty and Tennyson was in his tenth year, there was born, in the city of Liverpool, Arthur Hugh, son of James Butler Clough, cotton-merchant. When he was four years old he was taken with his parents to live at Charleston, United States, in "a large, ugly red brick house near the sea. 99 But at nine he was sent back to England to a preparatory school at Chester, and at ten he went to Rugby to spend seven years under the powerful moulding influence of Arnold, the maker of the modern English Public School. His family returned later on to England, and he spent many of his vacations with them in Liverpool.

A lad of fine physique, famous in the annals of Rugby football as "the best goal-keeper on record," and capable a few years afterwards of walking his fifty miles in a day, Clough nevertheless took but a secondary interest in the athletic side of life. He was keenly intellectual and was

ready for Arnold's famous "Sixth" a full year before his time. But above all, he was moulded by Arnold into a moral and religious earnestness of great intensity, together with a passionate belief in Rugby and Arnoldism as the saving and redeeming element in English life. When ready for college his one thought was which University would make the best centre from which old Rugbeians could turn the world to their way of thinking, and make good Churchmanship the general foundation of good citizenship in the world of

men.

So he goes up to Oxford with the Balliol Scholarship-the finest introduction a brilliant youth can have to the University career-there to be the intimate associate of Ward and Jowett, of Matthew Arnold and his brother, and others, the most talented undergraduates and graduates of his day. What part may not such a youth so placed hope to play in the intellectual, social, and religious history of his time?

A comely youth of more than common stature, with ample, dark, soft hair, brilliant complexion, and eyes that shone and sparkled with animation.

And yet there were elements in his training as applied to one of his peculiar constitution which were not perhaps altogether happy. "Arnold spoilt the Public