Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/88

 blame him. At least, the king knew his aim and followed it? It is curious to read the lines in which Arnold expresses this. He would not have approved the life, but he approved—since the king had deliberately chosen that life—the firmness and clearness of his choice, the settled purpose of his soul—

But this was the only point at which he approved the king's life of pleasure. In The New Sirens, which fine as it is in parts is feeble as a whole, he seems to express, with obscure length, the gloom, satiety, and sorrow of the soul in which mere pleasure ends, the reckless following of impulse after impulse.

Another poem of far higher quality, called The Voice, dwells, in the two last verses, on the same thought with a noble brevity and imagination. It records an hour when the ancient cry of youth to fulfil all joy came to him out of a forgotten time, came to him when his heart had been long sobered by dreary and doubtful thought, by heavy circumstance. Sweet and far, in strange contrast with his present trouble, like a wanderer from the world's extremity, it asked again to be listened to. And his answer is given in lovely poetry, in passionate revelation of himself:—