Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/154

 in and were broken by the strife. Ah, he thinks at the close, with that constantly recurring thought of his in which so much of his inner life and of ours is hidden, let the new world thunder on its noisy triumph and use its powers, be proud of its turbulent life or of its eternal trifling-yet there are a few who would in quiet take their bent towards unwearied pursuit of the perfect, who like Glanvil have "one aim, one business, one desire," who wait in joyous unconcern for the celestial light; and they, in these unthinking days, are the refuge and light of the world.

Then the two poems to Senancour, the writer of Obermann, mingle their personal and self-revealing verse with so wide a human interest that in all who read them a hundred questions rise—of their own soul, of the age in which they live, and of the fates of man. On the great difference of the second from the first I have already written, but I may dwell here on their charm—charm of grave thought, ranging far and wide, charm of happy word and phrase, and charm of natural description. The very atmosphere of that lovely land, where so many hearts have been healed, the flowerhaunted meadows, the shimmering lake below, the blue hills, the far-off snows—is in the loving verse, and it is mingled with the soul of Arnold and Obermann, till each mountain slope and every flower upon them, and the waves of the lake as they break on the shore, are of men, and through men, and in men.

Of all these elegies, the Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis