Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/70

 of doing. In later life he modified his view and felt that he had been too quick to condemn his world, But he was too proud to say that he had then been too blind to be able to divide the good from the evil in the turmoil, or that he had not then seen its good.

His earlier poetry then—since he and his world were so inharmonious—was, with a few exceptions, too much a poetry of opposition. He could not sufficiently disentangle himself from the pressure of his age, and he hated that pressure. Under it his poetry contended, mourned, and analysed. And it suffered, as poetry, from this perturbing element. Had he possessed the animation, like that of birds in spring, which marks the great poets, he would have neutralised this element. But he had it not; he could not lift himself into that bright, magnanimous air, in whose clearness a poet sees, and is able to love and help, the good as well as the evil, the joy as well as the trouble, of humanity.

Arnold sat by the tomb where he thought the true life of England lay dead, and mourned over its disappointed hopes. He did not hear the angel of the nation say, "What is best in England has arisen, and has gone before you into Galilee." It was not his to understand—"Let the dead past bury his own dead." Only at intervals the clouds lifted for him, and he saw through mist the flush of dawn; but he had not heard enough to follow that gleam. He had settled down in these early days into a stoic sadness, as yet unilluminated by humour. It had a certain moral force, a grim