Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/152



I rejoice to feel in these elegies, the delicate, sensitive art, the careful strength which, combined with a winning grace and serious love of quiet beauty, affect the soul as a still, fair autumn Italian day in lands full of human history affects the senses. Quietude, power, beauty, and tenderness pervade them.

The appreciations of Byron, Goethe, and Wordsworth, which in a poem on Obermann he carries further, are not only good in themselves, but they are applied to the story of man, and to the criticism of the time in which he lived. And the tenderness and gratitude with which he remembers the work of Wordsworth pass into gratitude to him for the healing which his verse has brought to the heart of man. A greater tenderness, a deeper reverence, a personal love and honour fill, as with sweet waters, the verses to his father's memory. But they also pass from personal feeling into feeling for the fates of man. What is the course of the life, he asks, of mortal men on the earth? Most men eddy about, blindly strive, achieve nothing, and perish. But some a thirst unquenchable fires, and they move to a clear goal; and of these he writes in a noble and imaginative passage, with a splendour of description. Only one out of many pilgrims reaches