Lovely all times, she lies, lovely to-night!

Only, methinks, some loss of habit's power Befalls me wandering through this upland dim.

Once passed I blindfold here, at any hour; Now seldom come I, since I came with him.

That single elm-tree bright Against the west-I miss it! is it gone?

25

We prized it dearly; while it stood, we said,

1 A. H. Clough (1819-1861), a man of brilliant gifts and attractive personality, holds an honorable, if subordinate place among the Victorian poets. (See p. 663), He attended Rugby where he was a favorite pupil of Dr. Arnold; he went to Oxford in 1837, and became a fellow of Oriel College in 1812. Matthew Arnold entered Oxford in 1841 and was made a fellow of Oriel College in 1845. Immediately after Clough's death Arnold referred to him as "one of the few people who ever made a deep impression upon me," and hinted at his intention of expressing in some form his feeling for his dead friend. (V. Arnold's Letters I. 177).

2 Two villages near Oxford. The poem gains in sincerity and definiteness by its numerous references to neighboring localities, intimately associated with the days which Clough and Arnold spent together at the University.

So some tempestuous morn in early June,
When the year's primal burst of bloom is

Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:

The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I! 60

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come

Into yon farther field!-'Tis done; and see,

Back'd by the sunset, which doth glorify The orange and pale violet evening-sky, Bare on its lonely ridge, the Tree!' the Tree! 160

I take the omen! Eve lets down her veil,

The white fog creeps from bush to bush about,

The west unflushes, the high stars grow bright,

And in the scatter'd farms the lights come out.

I cannot reach the signal-tree to-night, 165
Yet, happy omen, hail!

Hear it from thy broad lucent Arno-vale

(For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep

The morningless and unawakening sleep Under the flowery oleanders pale,)

170

7i. e. the "signal elm," the tree on the hill-top in 'the old haunt," which Arnold has referred to several times before. It was evidently a favorite meeting place of the two friends, and associated with memories of the Scholar-Gipsy, whose spiritual presence typified the indestructible nature of the ideal.

"Daphnis, the ideal Sicilian shepherd of Greek pastoral poetry, was said to have followed into Phrygia his mistress Piplea, who had been carried off by robbers, and to have found her in the power of the king of Phrygia, Lityerses. Lityerses used to make strangers try a contest with him in reaping corn, and to put them to death if he overcame them. Hercules arrived in time to save Daphnis, took upon himself the reaping-contest with Lityerses, overcame him, and slew him. The Lityerses-song connected with this tradition was, like the Linus-song, one of the early plaintive strains of Greek popular poetry and used to be sung by corn-reapers." Arnold.

What though the music of thy rustic flute
Kept not for long its happy, country tone;
Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy

TO MARGUERITE

(From Switzerland)

Yes! in the sea of life enisled,

With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollow lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;

And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour-

Oh, then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain
Oh might our marges meet again!

Who ordered, that their longing's fire
Should be as soon as kindled, cool'd?
Who renders vain their deep desire?-
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.

ABSENCE

(From the same)

In this fair stranger's eyes of grey
Thine eyes, my love! I see.
I shiver; for the passing day
Had borne me far from thee.

This is the curse of life! that not A nobler, calmer train

5

DOVER BEACH
(From New Poems, 1867)

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;-on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.5

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd sand, Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

20

At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.

10

"I was subject to the emperor my father, and bred under him, who was the most proper person living to put me out of conceit with pride, and to convince me that it is possible to live in a palace without the ceremony of guards, without richness and distinction of habit, without torches, statues, or such other marks of royalty and state; and that a prince may shrink himself almost into the figure of a private gentleman, and yet act, nevertheless, with all the force and majesty of his character when the common weal requires it." Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Bk. I.

The