Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/59

 scenery, in the poem. Clough loved the mountains. Wales and the Highlands were dear to him. He wandered alone, meditating, among the glens; it was his great pleasure to have his contemplation broken by nature's sudden shocks of mild surprise, and to weave what he saw into what he thought. His friend, Frank Palgrave, who wrote a gentle, distinguished memoir of him, said that his mind was "haunted like a passion" by the loveliness of poetry and scenery; that by his "acceptance in the natural landscape, he had inherited a double portion of the spirit of Wordsworth. He loved nature, not only for its earthly sake, but for the divine and the eternal interfused with it." This seems too strongly said, but it is the judgment of a friend. Clough may have loved nature as much as Wordsworth, but he had not Wordsworth's power of expressing his love. His descriptions are ill-composed; the spiritual passion he felt slightly appears in them. In the Bothie, the halting metre mangles the description; indeed, here, as in the whole of his poetry, the execution lags behind the conception. Art had not thrown her mantle over this man; the language does not enhance or uplift the thought; it rather depresses and lowers it; and, though we always understand him, which is a blessed gift to us, considering what we suffer from others, we wish that the clearness of the poem had been accompanied by a finer composition and workmanship, Palgrave even goes so far as to say that "one feels a doubt whether in