wrote what I regard as the most striking | than Clough does in it the state of mind poem of his life, but also the most perfect of an enthusiast for the antique type of expression of the impotence to which man, who, for his modern experience, had Carlyle's gospel, taken alone, leads a mind which, beyond what it found in Carlyle, had little but its deep admiration of the old classical strength to sustain it. This poem was, again, in hexameter verse, and called by Clough "Amours de Voyage," which might, perhaps, be translated "Loves of the Way." One of the mottoes prefixed to it is from Shakespeare:

been led into the wilderness by Carlyle, and left there. You see, one by one, almost all Carlyle's crotchets dissolved in a classical tincture not at all Carlylian; his scorn for history itself, so far as history is not heroic; his detestation of formulæ; his contempt for the smug middle-class; his disposition to mock at the sentimentalities of life; his hatred of the Jesuits; his grim preference for Sans-culottes; and yet you see all these feelings blended almost equally with an enthusiasm for the great classical ideals of which Carlyle, in his Scotch peasanthood, had little or no trace. A more impressive picture of a doubting mind that doubted everythingeven love and yet did not doubt that the classical grandeur was grandeur indeed, and that a disdainful classical fortitude has in it an element of strength which is not otherwise to be found by those who cannot believe very genuinely in any spiritual revelation, is not, I think, in existence, than that presented in "Amours de Voyage." It is a painful picture, a picture of a morbid condition of mind deliberately drawn, but, nevertheless, most powerfully drawn, and full of lasting memories. I can give you but a glimpse, here and there, of the results. Claude goes to Rome, sick of everything, and finds his general impression of Rome, in the first instance, one that he can only describe.

thus:

Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it,

All the foolish destructions and all the sillier savings,

All the incongruous things of past incompatible

ages,

Seem to be treasured up here, to make fools of present and future.

Rome, he says, disappoints him much,
but soon he "shrinks, and adapts himself
to it: "

Rome, believe me, my friend, is like its own
Monte Testaceo,

Merely a marvellous mass of broken and cast-
away wine-pots.

Ye gods! what do I want with this rubbish of ages departed,

Things that Nature abhors, the experiments that she has failed in ?

What do I find in the Forum? An archway and two or three pillars.

Well, but St. Peter's? Alas, Bernini has filled it with sculpture!

No one can cavil, I grant, at the size of the great Coliseum.

Let us seek Knowledge; the rest may come | thew Arnold-it is in the second set of and go as it happens. Knowledge is hard to seek, and harder yet to adhere to.

Knowledge is painful often; and yet when we
know, we are happy.
Seek it, and leave mere Faith and Love to

come with the chances.

And so the ravelled threads of the poem
are all cut, in the end. The fall of the
Roman Republic ends it in one way, the
exhaling of the lover's dreams in anoth-
er; while the final expression of a convic-
tion that knowledge is greater than love,
and that none the less you have not knowl-
edge enough to guide yourself, but must
leave that guidance "to the chances".
which are perhaps not controlled by any
higher love
-ends the poem intellectu-
ally, with a sharp click of the rationalistic
shears.

stanzas addressed to the author of "Ober-
mann". - makes his touching and tender,
but hopeless wail over the burial of the
great Christian hope- you will see, I
think, what I mean, when I say that while
Arnold feels what Clough felt, he does
not attach to those deeper feelings the
sense of final and overpowering authority
which Clough, reason on it as he would,
was compelled to attach to them. Clough
would not have written, as Arnold wrote:

While we believed on earth he went,
And open stood his grave;
Men called from chamber, Church, and tent,
And Christ was by to save.
Now he is dead, far hence he lies
In the lorn Syrian town;
And on his grave, with shining eyes,
The Syrian stars look down.

his sense of the almost irreconcilable inconsistency between the triumph of our Lord's religion and the triumph of the world's evil; but doubt as he would, the higher buoyancy of the spiritual faith asserted itself at last, and vague as his faith undoubtedly was, the final note is always exultation, and not mild despondency. "In the great Gospel and true creed, Christ is yet risen, indeed, Christ is yet risen."

It would, however, be most unjust to No; Clough expressed with a passion Clough to suppose that this poem, though that struggles through a pent-up and heavit clearly represented his state of mind at ing breast -a passion not of poetic feelone epoch of his life, was meant to pic-ing, but of bleeding and lacerated faith ture his deepest and truest convictions. How far he might trust the spiritual emotions which were so strong in him, Clough never clearly made out; but it was his deepest and final belief that, more or less, trust them you must, and rather more than less. In this, as it seems to me, he differs, and differs for the better, from one who has the advantage of him often in the form and perfectness of imaginative expression, and who writes much on the same themes, I mean his friend and brother-poet, Matthew Arnold. In Arnold, the "lyrical cry" is as delicate and true as it is in Clough, but the poet has nothing like equal confidence that it comes from the same depth, that it speaks with the same authority. If you will read - I hardly dare trust myself to read to you, here the impressive, the overpowering lines which Clough wrote under the heavy sense of the overflowing sinfulness of Naples, the burden of which was that Christ is not risen, and could not be risen, in spite of all the asseverations of loving disciples and tender women who affirmed that they had seen him in his risen form, or else it were impossible that all this evil should have been generated and grown up under the very shadow of his reign; and the less powerful, but still most genuine recantation, in which he unsays his bitter words, and declares that, nevertheless, "in the great Gospel and true creed, Christ is yet risen indeed, Christ is yet risen;" and if you will compare these with the lines in which Mat

I must give you one piece, in which the note of exultation is predominant, before I conclude. It was written, no doubt, during the latter part of Clough's life at Oxford, when many of his early friends had followed Dr. Newman into the Roman Catholic Church; while some were, like himself, rather disposed to follow Carlyle into a Church not at all Catholic, but rather, grim, violent, and picturesquely dim. Clough felt these sudden separations with that depth of tender feeling which always marked his friendships, and expressed his own emotion in the following marvellously beautiful lines:

QUA CURSUM VENTUS.
As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay
With canvas drooping, side by side,
Two towers of sail at dawn of day

Are scarce long leagues apart descried;

When fell the night, upsprung the breeze,
And all the darkling hours they plied,
Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas
By each was cleaving, side by side:

To my ear, that exulting strain is hardly ever absent from any of Clough's deeper poems. Even in the poem which represents his most cynical mood -the nity, "Amours de Voyage - you hear it rising again and again, and sometimes swelling till it all but drowns the doubter in him. His nature had in it the deepest sympathy with "the blithe breeze and the great seas," which seem to image all that is most elastic in the universe

"Yes."

"To whom is she consigned ?" "To Dana & Co."

The consul had meanwhile examined the passport, and finding it satisfactory, copied the following entry from the official document into the open register before him: "Thomas Ashbourne British subject — Dublin, Ireland civil engineer."

He then wrote on the passport in large figures, with red ink, the number 13, and returned it to its owner.

The new arrival looked at it carefully, shook his head, elevated his eyebrows, and stared again and again at the ominous figure. There was something comically familiar in his attitude, but her Majesty's consul for Japan, who in those days was considered a personage of very great importance, did not seem at all inclined to place himself with Mr. Ashbourne on the footing of equality apparently solicited. He contented himself, therefore, by saying,

"The fee, sir, is five dollars, if you please." Ashbourne handed over the sum, and addressing the consul in an altered tone of the strictest formality, said, "May I take the liberty of asking you, sir, what is the meaning of that large number' 13' which you have just written so beautifully in red ink on my passport?"

Oh, that signifies your entry in the consular register."

"Ahem!" murmured Ashbourne with a thoughtful air; "then I must tell you, Mr. Consul, that I have drawn a confoundedly bad number."

"Well, somebody had to draw it."

"Come, now, I don't see that at all, Mr. Consul. Some misfortune must take place in this wretched world, but everybody has a right to wish that he should be exempted from it. For my own part I am quite willing to leave the whole sum of misery that is daily endured on our planet to any one of my fellows. But look, there come three of them now. I will detain you no longer. I have the honor, Mr. Cousul," and he concluded by bowing himself out of the august presence of her Majesty's commercial representative in Japan.

The three gentlemen who now entered were English merchants, who, without uttering one unnecessary word, got themselves registered under the numbers 14, 15, and 16, as Mr. M'Bean from Glasgow, Mr. Haslett from Manchester, and Mr. West from London. Then leaving the consulate, these three travellers who, during the long passage from Shanghai to Yokohama had become well acquainted with each other-made off in the direction of the foreign settlement. When about a hundred paces on their way they met a young man, who silently saluted them without moving a muscle of his pale face, and whose cold recognition they returned in the same manner. The man having passed, M'Bean remarked,

"A strange and mysterious fellow this Jervis. I can't say that I have taken a great liking to him."

"Nor I," said West and Haslett in succession.

The stranger, in truth, could not boast of a prepossessing exterior, though it would have been difficult to define the displeasing elements in him. He was tall, "Yes, of course; and somebody will be slim, and well built, with a light, quick drowned this year, and somebody must step; and in his movements there was also be hanged this year. I don't like something stealthy and elastic, like the that number 13. I consider it the very gait of a cat. His smooth-combed hair worst in the whole system of figures! was of a deep black hue, in remarkable But that is the well-deserved reward for contrast with his clear, northern complexbeing too forward. Why on earth did I ion and bright, gray eyes. His sharply make a bet with myself, that without ask- marked features showed a bold and noble ing my way of anybody, I would be the profile; but looking full at that smoothfirst of all the passengers on board the shaven face and high, narrow forehead, 'Cadiz' to call on the English consul? the observer could not help remarking Had I joined my fellow-travellers, I should the prominent cheek-bones, the large only have been registered five minutes mouth with thin, firmly closed lips, the later, and then perhaps another might heavy jaw and broad chin, which gave to have drawn this unlucky number and the whole visage an appearance of great welcome to it, as far as I am concerned." energy, combined with coldness and re"A very unchristian remark," inter- serve. posed the consul, forgetting for a moment his official dignity so far as to address a guileless traveller in a semi-familiar man

ner.

On Mr. Jervis entering the consul's office he found that dignitary again deeply lost in the study of the big book aforesaid; so he waited in patience, motionless,