Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/54

 And then, his career being decided for him, and his drifting boat anchored by another hand than his own, he settled down to the prim ways, and regular work, and consistent routine of a government office, with its pleasant holidays. And then, too, he married, and loved his wife, his children, and his home; and gathered love around him, and found that love did abide and edify. His humour was set free from sorrow. The questions which had so deeply perplexed him were still subjects of careful thought, but they tormented him no more. He passed, we are told, "from the speculative to the constructive phase of thought," and would have, had he lived, expressed his matured conceptions of life in a more substantial way. He was happy and useful. He was always oppressed with the "sadness of the world, and the great difficulties of modern social life," but he turned his mind steadily, in this atmosphere of love and happiness, and with the deep experience they gave him, to help towards this solution. I wish he had had time to record in poetry his conclusions, but office work is a great disintegrator of poetic creation, and very little was done, and that not good as poetry, before the blind Fury came with the abhorred shears, and slit the thin-spun life.

He was only forty-three years old. The tales published under the title of Mari magno were written during the last holidays of his life, while he searched for health, and the last of them when he was dying. They