Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/104



Another aspect of the same thought is to be found in the poem—Palladium, where the soul, as far apart from our outward life as the Palladium was from the battle round Troy, is pictured on its lonely height. When it fails we die, while it lives, we cannot wholly be a victim of the world.

The best of all these battling, fragmentary poems is A Summer Night. Its composition is good, its arrangement clear, its thoughts well-shaped. It does not wander like the rest. It is passionate throughout, and it soars to a climax from which it descends in peace, like a still sunset after storm. The natural description with which it begins is done with a delicate purity of touch. It represents Arnold's temper at the point where it was changing from unmixed sadness and a somewhat fierce contempt of the world, into a better and wiser mind, into a greater harmony with mankind, into pity for men with a touch of love in the pity; into some hope, some faith for them, and therefore into some hope and faith in God.

There are yet other poems which illustrate this story of a soul in those troubled years, but enough has been said of these fragments, The essence of the history is concentrated in the Stanzas in Memory of the Author of Obermann. This poem places Arnold as he was in 1852. Fifteen years later his position was not