The tragedies, though least of all, the earliest Atalanta in Calydon-with the relief of its lovely choruses-labour under the same excess of emotions, and of one in particular. It mars them as dramas, which cannot live without variety, light and shade. They are clogged by mere bulk. Fleets of charming fancies drift helplessly about volumes from two hundred and nineteen to five hundred and thirty-two pages long. But their abiding enemy is monotony of emphasis. From that they are the worst, not the only, sufferers. In no form does the poet's verse escape it. The habit is the more to be regretted that when, as occasionally elsewhere, the chronic tempestuousness abates, the gift of melody remains not the less surpassing that it becomes gentle and reposeful. As, lulled by breeze and waves, he floats: I lean my cheek to the cold grey pillow, The deep soft swell of the full broad billow, And wish the wheel of the world would stand.15 And it stands for him, by no means in joy, though not in sorrow altogether, as he watches beside the cradle of a baby dead: The little hands that never sought Earth's prizes, worthless all as sands, We ask; but love's self silent stands, Ere this, perchance, though love know nought, The little hands.16 He has proved that he could write with no less tenderness, and more gaiety, about living babyhood. And how he adores heroism and genius-contemporary as well as past! The more the pity that he has not sung sometimes of everyday life, of ordinary manhood and womanhood in a like temper! Amidst the loftiness, the intoxication, the splendour of his panegyrics and maledictions, the intensity of his landscape-drawing, even the grand thoughts which he lavished, I often pine, to my shame, for a cup of cold water, a little sober calm, a ray of common human household kindliness. But, I know, it was not his way, unless for an interlude. Whether in much masterly prose, or in overwhelming verse, a born fighter, he must rank as such; though a generous combatant, as well as a fiery one! Mr. Swinburne's Poems, referred to below, are published by Messrs. Chatto & Windus. 1 Sidney's Arcadia (Astrophel), st. 2. 2 Itylus (Poems and Ballads, 1st Ser.), stanzas 3, 4, 5. 3 The Year of the Rose (Poems and Ballads, 2nd Ser.), st. 3. 4 A Ballad of Death (Poems and Ballads, 1st Ser.), st. 11. 5 After Death (ibid.), st. 1. 6 A Forsaken Garden (Poems and Ballads, 2nd Ser.), st. 4. 7 A Wasted Vigil (ibid.), st. 8. See p. 361, and Percy's Reliques. The Weary Wedding (Poems and Ballads, 3rd Ser.), last three stanzas. 10 The Armada (ibid.), II, st. 2. 11 England: an Ode (Astrophel), st. 20. 12 Four Songs of Four Seasons: Spring in Tuscany (Poems and Ballads, 2nd Ser.), st 9. 13 An Autumn Vision (Astrophel), II. 14 Inscriptions (ibid.), II. 15 A Swimmer's Dream (ibid.), V, st. 2. 16 A Baby's Death (A Century of Roundels), III. ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 1819-1861 POETS in general love to preach, and to a congregation. When they soliloquize they choose a market-place. For a very few the primary, if not the final, forum is themselves. Afterwards they may be persuaded to admit the public to their confidence. At the moment of singing they had been honestly unaware of its existence. They resorted to poetry simply because they knew of no better instrument with which to hammer out thoughts vital to their own souls. If the resulting ideas fail to touch other hearts or ears they do not mind. Their disregard of miscellaneous sympathy, the occasional crudity of form, have no common origin with the roughness of a writer who, having studied his art as a violinist studies his, challenges criticism to disentangle the beauty from the excrescences concealing it. These solitaries do not concern themselves with the artistic requirements of the medium of expression they have adopted. They harbour no intention, unless to mould and develop for their own use a conception or an aspiration. To this limited class of poets who, first and last, are thinkers, Arthur Hugh Clough belongs. Nature, however, endowed him with poetical gifts more or less independent of that specific characteristic. Thus, a peculiarly delicate sense of rhythm distinguished him from the commencement of his career. A River Pool, written when he was twentyone, has a dreamy sound Of ripples lightly flung.1 Religious poets of the early seventeenth century would not have disdained the harmony of The Music of the World and of the Soul, another product of Clough's early manhood. A felicity, almost a mystery, of tone lifts above the commonplace Songs in Absence, twelve years later in date : The billows whiten and the deep seas heave; Fly once again, sweet words, to her I leave, It lends an additional charm to his song of Endymion on Latmos, which shows also a rare quality with himwarmth, as of a lover: Can it be, and can it be? Upon Earth, and here below, That enwraps us, O my Goddess, O my Queen! And I turn At thy feet to fall before thee; And thou wilt not: At thy feet to kneel and reach and kiss thy finger-tips; And thou wilt not; And I feel thine arms that stay me, And I feel O mine own, mine own, mine own, I am thine, and thou art mine! 3 Dipsychus's accompaniment to the gliding of the gondola -not to speak of the graver significance of the phantasyis the poetry of motion-very Venice: VOL. II How light we go, how soft we skim ! T In moonlight is it now, or shade ? Something even more, from the suggestion of aching regret, is the musical flow of the herd-girl's hastening cry to her cows: The skies have sunk, and hid the upper snow Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie- And wet will be the path, and wet shall we— Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie! Ah dear, and where is he, a year agone, Who stepped beside and cheered us on and on? In foreign land, or on a foreign sea— Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie! 5 He had other qualities besides, marking a poet; and at the opening of life he won the rank at a stroke, with The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich. There could be no more vivid description of a typical Highland scene than that of the students' bathing-place : There is a stream Springing far off from a loch unexplored in the folds of great mountains, Falling two miles through rowan and stunted alder, enveloped Then for four more in a forest of pine, where broad and ample Spreads, to convey it, the glen with heathery slopes on both sides |