Page:The Poems and Prose remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, volume 1 (1869).djvu/51

Rh and increasing interest in all social questions, and in every way he seems to have been full of spirit and vigour. To his younger friends and pupils he especially endeared himself. One of them says: 'My Oxford days seem all coloured with the recollection of happy and most instructive walks and talks with him. We used to meet every day almost, though at different colleges; and it was my regular Sunday holiday to breakfast with him, and then take a long ramble over Cumnor Hurst or Bagley Wood. When I recall those days, the one thing that comes back upon me most, even more than the wisdom and loftiness and suggestiveness of his conversation, is his unselfishness and tender kindness. Many must have told you what a gift he had for making people personally fond of him; I can use no other word. For myself, I owe him more than I can ever tell, for the seed of just and noble thoughts sown, for the pure and lofty type of character set before me; but the feeling of personal attachment is the strongest of all.' Another friend of this period says: 'In him I felt I had an example of a nobleness and tenderness of nature most rare, and one, too, who, since I was an undergraduate, had always given me not only sincere love, but wise and sincere counsel in many difficulties. What he would think on any doubtful point, was indeed often in the mind of many others with me. Often, too, I have remembered that, by his taste, I was first led to read and take pleasure in Wordsworth.'

Thus his life passed on with much of cheerful and active interest and work. Yet it would seem, from his letters, that he was living at Oxford under a sense of intellectual repression. He appears at one time to have doubted about undertaking the tutor's work, but to have overcome the doubt. He evidently regarded teaching as his natural vocation, and he had great enjoyment in it; but the sense of being bound by his position to silence on many important subjects probably oppressed him. At intervals he expresses vague inclinations to