Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/119

 and the others about subjects beyond himself. These poems then I shall briefly discuss.

It was not only the youthful passion of love which, if we judge from his early poetry, was of small force in Arnold. He seems also, in his desire for almost a stoic temperance, to have felt less than other poets those eager enthusiasms for natural beauty, for human causes, for universal ideas which stir into great emotion, whether of joy, aspiration, or pity, poets in their youth. The intense glow of young life, of which love-poems are only one result, was either weak in him, or repressed; and in consequence, his poetic life was sure, sooner or later, to suffer from the exhaustion at which it did arrive. He ceased to write poetry.

But when that youthful fire is strong in a poet, it does not burn out. It only changes the objects on which it feeds, and glows with a steadier heat around them. When it is not strong, it is easily put out by ill-fortuned circumstances, and the poet is then left without one of the elements which most feed, impel, and develop the youthful imagination. Such ill fortune, we have seen, did befall Arnold. The pressure of that noisy, sceptical time ministered to the chilling of what youthful fire he possessed. His training also chilled it. Rigorous teachers imposed on him and Clough moral and intellectual responsibilities, too early for their strength, too heavy for them to bear, and froze the genial current of their youth. His father's mind, his father's view of life, lay heavy on