"God and his own soul stood sure." At the close of that striking, if somewhat difficult, poem, La Saisiaz, speaking for once in his own person, in his fancy he longs for fame-fame in which might unite the powers of all those great men who once lived near the lake where he is writing, the wit of Voltaire, the learning of Gibbon, the eloquence of Rousseau, Byron's "rainbow, tears"-and all for what? Why that men yet to be might say of him, “He there, . . . crowned by verse and prose, believed in soul, was very sure of God!" . he at least For himself, he had always the buoyancy, the ardor that comes of limitless hope and desire. There's no undertone of sadness in him. No dim horizon shut down in front of him. More than any other English poet, he exemplifies the meaning of that wonderful phrase of Scripture, "the power of an endless life." Mr. Sharp tells us how in his later years he said to him: "Death! It is this harping on Death I despise so much, this idle and often cowardly as well as ignorant harping. What fools who talk thus. amico mio, you know as well as I that death is life. Pshaw! It is foolish to argue upon such a thing even. ... Never say of me that I am dead!" Why, He has his wish. We who learned to know the living Browning find it impossible ever to think him dead. And at the core of his fame will ever lie, I believe, this irrepressible power of personal life. In the next century men may not speak of him as the greatest English poet of his generation-it is too soon for us to be sure about that; they surely will not speak of him as the greatest artist in verse-that fame is Tennyson's; many of his works they will, I think, forget to read. But they will remember him as a genius of mass and power; as one of the subtlest explorers of the human heart, endowed with sinewy intellect, large imagination, capacity for enjoyment and appreciation of all forms of life, and with a gift of utterance that, if not often flowing nor always clear, had immense breadth, pungency, vigor. But they will think of him most of all, I believe, as the one poet who expressed the robust, unconquerable vigor of faith and hope that underlay all the shifting doubt of his restless age, the spiritual hero and victor in the poetry of the mid-nineteenth century. One poem, I think, will always link itself with special significance to his memory,-I mean his very last poem, which we did not read until after he was gone, surely one of the most striking last poems ever poet wrote. The breath of larger life is in it. It is as if the whole poet had summed himself up in those noble words of hail and farewell: At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, When you set your fancies free, Will they pass to where-by death, fools think, imprisoned- -Pity me? Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? -Being-who? One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Sleep to wake. No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, A ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH MONG the most potent and beneficent influences in the teaching and example of Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School. The distinctively intellectual qualifications of Arnold for his work,-his scholarship, his executive capacity, his stimulating methods of instruction, his vivid historical imagination,-all these he himself considered subservient to the highest purpose of education: the formation of intelligent, independent moral character. His famous statement to his boys became the watchword of Rugby: "It is not necessary that this should be a school of three hundred, or even one hundred, or even of fifty boys; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen." And such he made it. It was not so much. that he taught religion; rather that all his teaching was religious. He was not prone to religious introspection. His whole cast of mind was not philosophical or speculative, but outward and practical. Impatient of our factitious distinctions between sacred and secular things, he thought and spoke of religion as duty and service rather than as belief, and as binding equally upon all the acts of life. It was inevitable that pupils who passed years under the training of such a teacher should imbibe much of his temper. "What I want to find in a boy," Arnold used to say, "is moral thoughtfulness." It soon came to be noticed that the boys of his sixth form had unusual maturity and strength of practical judgment, and an unusual sense of the moral quality of action. They had not been encouraged to think overmuch on the grounds of religious belief, or to be constantly interrogating their own inner experiences; on the contrary, they were interested beyond the wont of boys of their years in the affairs of the world outside-political, historical-and they had become accustomed to measure all these affairs by ethical and religious standards. Accepting implicitly the great principles of Christian teaching, they applied those principles in healthy, outward fashion to conduct. In 1837 there were two boys in Rugby who were to become poets, and whose poetry was to have a unique value as the best expression of an attitude of religious doubt and question characteristic of many thoughtful men about the middle of the nineteenth century. One of these boys was Dr. Arnold's son, Matthew, the other, three years his senior, was Arthur Hugh Clough. No pupil ever felt more deeply the influence of Arnold than did this young Arthur Clough. Not that there was anything priggish or morbid about him. He was not only the best scholar in his form, but the best goal-keeper in the football field and the best swimmer in the river; a buoyant, ambitious, healthy fellow. But there are passages in his early letters that show how thoroughly he had accepted Arnold's ideals, and how entirely he was governed by unselfish moral impulse. "I verily believe," he writes a friend, "my whole being is soaked through with the wishing and hoping and striving to do the school good." He is looking forward to entering one of the universities next year, and decides for Oxford partly because there is, he learns, a "high Arnold set that is just germinating at Balliol under the auspices of Stanley and Lake" (who had gone up the year before), but chiefly because he thinks he may do more good there. And the possibilities of Oxford for good or evil he thinks far greater than those of Cambridge. "Suppose," he exclaims, "suppose Oxford became truly good and truly wise!" With such ingenuous aspirations, Clough, in 1837, at the age of eighteen, went up to the university. But he had not been in Oxford a month before he found that the center of influence there was Oriel rather than Balliol. The religious tone of the university was decided, not by the Rugby set, but by that young fellow of Oriel who was preaching every Sunday afternoon in St. Mary's Church. More than forty years after, Clough's friend, Matthew Arnold, told us of the charm that voice had for him: Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music,subtle, sweet, mournful? It was clear that the spiritual forces of the place were swayed by this man, John Henry Newman, and the group of his immediate friends and disciples. No young man of thoughtful and reverent temper could escape their influence. As for Clough, he says that for two years he was like a straw drawn up a chimney. But-and here was the fatal danger-he could not help seeing that the teaching of these men was, in most respects, diametrically opposed to what he had learned at Rugby. They counseled obedience, and discouraged private opinion. They urged the authority of a church, and disparaged the sufficiency of Scripture. The whole force of their movement was directed to check those liberal tendencies in religion and politics of which Arnold was a representative. They thoroughly disliked Arnold; and Arnold, though some of them were his intimate friends, Keble was godfather of his son Matthew,—yet felt with pain that it was impossible to maintain intimate relations with them. Clough tried for a while to keep out of what he calls "this vortex of philosophism and discussion"; but for so eager and inquisitive a mind as his that was impossible. Like many young men at that time, he came to question the validity of his religious beliefs while yet he could not assent to any churchly authority as a substitute for them. He had no sympathy with the attitude of confident denial, it is probable that he never positively repudiated any article of his early faith, but in the strain of conflicting opinions and tendencies he found all ground of religious certitude slipping away beneath him. His story thereafter is the record of a man who retains in a very high |