Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/91

 Ten years before, as a boy of seventeen, he had taken the same walk with Fausta. What ten years had done we read in these verses; and the many changes and wanderings of his soul during this decade of life are well represented by the windings in the poem of various thoughts within the unity of its main thought. The lines I quoted are full of the soul of Arnold at twenty-seven. Their quiet, self-controlled, and solitary note, with their love of peace and obedience, and of union not with quarrelsome particulars but with the still movement of the general life to an ordered and luminous end, is no unfitting close to the struggle I have endeavoured to describe. "Blame not," he cries, "Fausta, the man who has seen into life, and who has attained tranquillity, but for thyself"—