Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/140



And now I touch on the two best poems he wrote—the Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis. Both are engaged with Clough, and they are suffused throughout with the tenderness of that deep friendship between man and man, which, begun in youth, keeps in it the purple light of youth; which, continued in manhood, wins the strength of the love which perseveres through sad experience, and the beauty which is born of, and nourished by associated memories. These fill the poems with sweet emotion, enfold them in an air of tenderness. Then, though in this tenderness of friendship he has escaped from self-consideration, yet they are filled with thought concerning the time they had both lived through, the needs of their age and its remedies. In this region, on which I must dwell further, the poems ought to be read together. They illustrate and supplement one another; and whatever is said, both in retrospect and prospect, however different may be the momentary turn of thought, all is brought into unity by the pervasiveness of the one emotion of memorial and loving friendship.

Then, too, another emotion fills the verse—that love of Oxford as the home of his youthful heart, as the nurse of intellect, the mother of fine causes, the teacher and cherisher of the wisdom and beauty of the ancients,