Page:The Poems and Prose remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, volume 1 (1869).djvu/310

294 for six days and spiritual on one day—a heathen in the lecture-room, a good Christian at his bedside; his mind is not a railway with one line exclusively up and the other no less incommunicably down; he is not content to travel one while towards Zion and anon towards Babylon; he has set his face to a single definite terminus, towards which, faster or slower, he will make his way.

There are men of this kind in the world, but somehow they are either silent or inarticulate—books of this kind there are not. There are men who have found for themselves this unity of mind and heart; but, in entering this door, they let it close behind them, and cannot say to their excluded brethren what is the secret of its spring; they are contented, but they know not how or why. They tell you, like the peasant, to hold straight on, meaning that you are always to take the right turn. They talk to you of being natural and sensible; they use language and profess convictions wholly at variance, though they see it not, with their conduct and actions. If you seek to put them right, they are a little perplexed, but more angry; they discourage and turn you back. You may not be like them, if you will not—which you cannot—talk like them. There are men—such was Arnold—too intensely, fervidly practical to be literally, accurately, consistently theoretical; too eager to be observant, too royal to be philosophical, too fit to head armies and rule kingdoms to succeed in weighing words and analysing emotions; born to do, they know not what they do. There are men such are many who see something of the solution, but think the unsolved problem more expedient—who will not speak the truth till everybody has begun to whisper it, who put off to more convenient seasons, and wait on providence and the public. Such are many; such, most emphatically, is not Mr. Newman.

Yet (and this to such as him is their exceeding great reward), we believe the public, or, if not the public, yet many thousand quiet souls in private, are prepared to hear what he has spoken—are ready for all this, and perhaps for more than this.