Page:The Poems and Prose remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, volume 1 (1869).djvu/30

Rh given himself up thoroughly to his classical and mathematical studies, and kept himself from plunging prematurely into the theological controversies then so rife at Oxford. Thus he would have been saved from all injury to the gradual and healthy growth of his mind and character. It is my own very strong impression that, had this been permitted, his future course of thought and speculation would have been essentially different from what it was in fact. Drawn as it were peremptorily, when a young man just coming up to college, into a decision upon questions the most important that can occupy the mind, the result was not surprising. After this premature forcing of Clough's mind, there came a reaction. His intellectual perplexity preyed heavily on his spirits, and grievously interfered with his studies.'

Another cause, also, which rendered him less able to endure the various demands made upon him in his new life was, that the strain of his and interests at Rugby had evidently considerably exhausted him.

Any reader of that marvellously vivid book, the 'Apologia' of Dr. Newman, will understand the trouble of spirit into which an impressionable nature must have been thrown by the storm that was raging round him, and by contact with such powerful leaders. The appeals made at once to the imagination, to all the tenderer parts of human nature, and to the reason, combined to render this struggle peculiarly intense. For a time Clough was carried away, how far it is impossible with any approach to certainty to say, in the direction of the new opinions. He himself said afterwards, that for two years he had been 'like a straw drawn up the draught of a chimney.' Yet in his mind the disturbance was but temporary. His own nature before long reasserted itself, proving, by the strength of its reaction, how wholly impossible it was for such a character to accept any merely external system of authority. Still, when the torrent had subsided, he found that not only had it swept away the new views which