Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/69

 too contemptuous of the world in which he lived, and too apart from it to give it that sympathy with its goods, which is one of the needs-be of a poet's power. He had courage, but it was not the courage of faith or of hope; he had little firm faith or hope in God, or in man, or, I may say, in himself. He had insight into the evils, the dulness, the follies, the decay, and death of the time at which he wrote; but he had little insight into its good, into the hopes and ideas which were arising in its darkness, or the life which was collecting itself together under its decay. His temper, therefore, was not joyous, nor was it in sympathy with the temper of the whirling but formative time in which he began, and continued, to write poetry. I do not say he was at daggers drawn with the elements of his world; he did not fight with them in the fierce way in which Byron and Shelley fought with those of their day; but he sat apart from them in a silent, brooding, wrathful, even contemptuous opposition, When he spoke against them in poetry, it was not so much to attack or vilify them, but to glorify the spirit which was the enemy of their turbulence. He did not see the elements of life and of far-off peace in the turbulence, and he never gave it sympathy. At times he could not bear it, and he fled away, like Obermann, into the solitudes of nature to commune with his own soul. It was not a wise thing to do, but he thought it eminently wise; and perhaps it was the only thing he was then capable