Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/57

 Sometimes it is a humorous mock at his own want of decision and force, as in that poem which wonders how Columbus could ever have conceived, or, rather, ever have carried out his conception of a world beyond the apparent infinity of waters. "How in God's name did Columbus get over," is the first line of the poem, and it ends by insisting that no one who had guessed that there was a world beyond the great waters would ever have gone sailing on, and that he himself could never have done it. T is a pure madness, a pure wonder to me." The Bothie also is full of quaint, observant humour. All the Oxford elements of his day are there; liked, even loved, but held up to gentle, subtle ridicule, delicately touched, but touched home. Oxford's young enthusiasm is pictured in the pupils, its quiet temper in the tutor, its dress, its ways of talk, the beginning of its æstheticism, its hereditary self-satisfaction, its variety of youthful intellect, its high sense of honour and morality, its manliness, its noisy athleticism, its sense that Oxford is, on the whole, though a doubt may now and then intrude, the mother, and the father, too, of the intellectual universe; and its reading parties, with a tutor, the incubator of statesmen, poets, philosophers, radical emigrants, and conservative squires, all fitted to replenish the earth and subdue it, to counsel and lead the world.

The poem, written in broken-boned hexameters, belongs to his early time. It is his longest effort. Four young men, with a grave tutor, form a reading