Sleep no more.

Glamis hath murdered sleep: and therefore
Cawdor

Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no

more !

eyes, and a somewhat florid complexion he had just thrown up his fellowship at Oriel, because at that time subscription to the Articles of the Church of England was the condition of all these Oxford prehe sheathed, as it were, the mortal an- ferments, and in deference to Carlyle's guish of the assassin's guilt in the fine exhortation to admit no insincerities into imaginative scabbard of the poet's spirit- one's life, Clough, who felt that he did not ual expression. No murderer could have believe in the general teaching of the said that, or put the feeling of the mur-Thirty-nine Articles, thought himself derer sufficiently outside his own mind to conceive it. The poet who feels too keenly the griefs of other men - who feels them too much as they feel themcan never find the most adequate imaginative expression for them. Just conceive a real human being reproaching his mother in rhyme, as Hamlet does for her unfaithfulness to his father,

A bloody deed; almost as bad, good mother,
As kill a king, and marry with his brother.
Yet the rhyme adds force and point to the
imaginative presentation of the reproach,
while it would be fatal to the impressive-
ness of such a reproach in real life. We
shall never understand true poetry till
we have grasped the uses of the various
conventions by which the imaginative
presentation of emotion is separated from
its natural outpourings. For my part, I
believe that Clough would have been a
still greater poet than he was and he
was a much greater poet than he is ordi-
narily believed to be if he had been
able to put the life of what he sang more
at a distance from him than he did to
pass it on from his heart to his imagina-
tion, and there embody it in enduring
forms. It is to this purpose that the con-
ventional element in poetry is so useful.
When Milton wrote of Lycidas, he hardly
realized that it was Edward King of whom
he was writing, or realized it only suffi-
ciently to enable his fancy to play with
his sense of loss. When Matthew Ar-
nold sang of Thyrsis, he half concealed
from himself that it was Arthur Clough,
his old familiar friend, on whose death at
Florence he was musing sadly amidst the
meads and backwaters of the infant

bound to throw up a position inconsistent
with his liberty of thought and speech.
It was an act of pure conscience, for
which every one must reverence him.
But its immediate effect upon Clough's
mind, character, and imaginaton, was not,
I think, wholly fortunate. He had a great
admiration for Carlyle; but, as I have
told you, he used to say of him, with a
touch of bitterness, "Carlyle led us out
into the wilderness, and left us there."
And for a time, certainly, Clough himself
wandered in the wilderness into which
Carlyle had led him lonely, perplexed,
at odds with the society with which he
lived, tinged with a Carlylian scorn for
the conventional, and yet profoundly con-
scious of the fitness of the frame in which
convention sets a great deal of our social
life, desiring to fraternize with those who
denounce the conventional, but not find-
ing it very easy. - for convention is often
the deposit of centuries of instinctive
tact and taste, and no one breaks abruptly
with convention without feeling naked and
ashamed. He was a little Olympian in
his manner with strangers and a little em-
barrassed by the sympathy of friends, for
there appeared to be a great depth of
pride in Clough. Moreover, he was full
of hot thoughts cased in a deep reserve —
a dreamer of Utopian dreams, with far
too vivid a sense of the strength of our
actual habits and prepossessions ever to
make a serious attempt at realizing them.
He was a passionate foe of luxury and
lover of simplicity, though he had a strain
of self-consciousness that made his own
manner somewhat too silent and stately
for perfect simplicity.
Another great
friend of Clough's and of my own, Walter
Bagehot, in whom the world lost too early
a very original as well as a very subtle
thinker, has incidentally painted Clough's
manner so vividly in one of his essays,
that I think I cannot do better than read
the sentences I refer to.
It is in an essay
on Henry Crabb Robinson. Speaking of
Crabb Robinson's inability to remember
names, Bagehot says that in that excel-
lent man's conversation Clough always
figured as "that admirable and accom-

plished man

-

you know whom I mean as Milton invoked her, though he once the one who never says anything." And invokes her in burlesque; he could never in referring to the delight which Crabb have commemorated Arnold, as Arnold Robinson took in reading poems of commemorated him, as a classical shepWordsworth's at his breakfast parties to herd. Clough was an idealist, but an his friends, Bagehot goes on, "There are idealist always pressing for greater reality some of Wordsworth's poems at which I in life, and he liked neither the fancy never look even now without thinking of dresses of fanciful poetry nor its vague the wonderful and dreary faces which abstractions. Once, I remember, when Clough used to make while Mr. Robinson I praised to him some book with a mysti. was reading them. To Clough, certain of cal turn in it, he spread out his hand and Wordsworth's poems were part of his in- called my attention to the fact that his ner being, and he suffered at hearing fingers widened, instead of tapering tothem obtruded at meal times, just as a wards the ends, remarking that men High Churchman would suffer at hearing whose fingers taper are disposed to symthe Collects of the Church. Indeed, these bolism and mysticism, but that men with poems were amongst the Collects of fingers like his cannot rest on anything Clough's Church." And Clough remained but broad and homely fact. At the same to the last a silent, reserved, and some-time his nature was deeply religious, in what perplexed man, a too anxious scan- spite of his craving to satisfy equally the ner of his own heart, a contemptuous demands of the intellect and the emotions. critic of the comfortable middle-class so- of the heart. The consequence was, that ciety of his time, and a kind of Don though in pathos and delicacy of feeling Quixote whenever he saw a chance of some few of Clough's lyrics have rarely really serving any human being, whether been surpassed, his whole poetic mind in his own social sphere or not-all the needed a freer and larger medium for its more if in one beneath it-though no one expression than any which had been comknew better the difficulties of rendering monly used in English poetry. Somesuch services truly. In one of his Scotch times he used blank verse, as in that most tours he walked two days over the moun- characteristic complaint of his that God tains from a house by the side of Loch appears not to encourage us, in these Ericht to Fort William, and two days modern days, to spend much time in back again, only to get the proper medi- purely devotional attitudes of feeling: cines for a forester's child who was lying sick of a fever at the former place, beyond the reach of medical help. But it was not often that so strong a man could see his way to serving his fellow-men effectually amidst the perplexities of this a remark to which he returns again and complicated world; and hence he moved again, with a sort of heavy groan, in his uneasily about, half inclined to reproach correspondence. But blank verse was the great spiritual Captain for not sound- not really a medium suited to Clough's ing the advance in a manner more audible genius, which was, if I may say so, a to ears in which so many strange sounds genius for moving buoyantly under a great are ringing. It is obvious, I think, that a weight of superincumbent embarrassman with his mind constantly concen- ment. I have already quoted from Mr. trated, as Clough's was, on the desire to Bagehot a description of the plaits and make human society more real in its un- furrows in his forehead when he listened derstanding of its duties, and in his con- to those with whom he could not agree, scientious laboriousness to fulfil them, and yet from whom he did not know how could never be a pastoral poet; and in to express his difference. I remember, spite of Clough's love for the simplicities, too, how, when I endeavored, in twilight or rather, perhaps, by reason of it, for talks with him, to lay any of my youthful pastoral poetry is conventional in its sim- perplexities before him, he, in the kindliplicities, and he was ardent for over-riding ness of his heart and the extreme embarconventionalities by the help of some rassment of his intellect as to whether he truer insight into nature, he never was should do more harm than good by his a pastoral poet in any true meaning of the answers, would pick up with the tongs term. There is sometimes a humorous, one little mite of coal after another from sometimes a passionate, directness in his the grate and put it on the fire, as a mere manner, which pastoral poets eschew. physical relief to his perplexed and rather He could never have invoked the Museinarticulate feelings towards a junior

It seems His newer will

We should not think of Him at all, but turn,
And of the world that He has given us make

The best we can

the impression of an eager, cordial, and embarrassed speech.

Again, it would be difficult to find a better rhythm than this for the purpose of Clough's peculiar humor. Take another instance, in the description of one of the pupils, the elaborate dresser of the party, as he comes down prepared to go the Highland banquet:Airlie descended the last, cffulgent as god of Olympus;

Blue, perceptibly blue, was the coat that had white-silk facings,

Waistcoat blue, coral-buttoned, the white-tie finely adjusted,

Coral

moreover the studs on a shirt as of crochet of women:

whom he only half understood, and was very anxious not to lead into the rather dreary wilderness in which he himself was wandering. Well, this sense of embarrassment, this inertia about him, which was very real and constant, was bound to get some sort of expression in his more intellectual poetry; and he found in the English hexameter, varied, as he varied it, with frequent spondees i.e., with fre quent feet of two protracted syllables, instead of one protracted and two unaccented just the medium that he desired. For this metre expresses easily not only the resisting medium, but the buoyancy that makes itself felt through the resisting medium. I know no rhythm so effective as the rhythm of Clough's English hexameters for the purpose of expressing at once indomitable buoyancy of feeling and the inert mass of the resistance which that buoyancy of feeling has to encoun- In a subsequent part of the poem, a ter. I can illustrate what I mean very Scotch damsel, with whom the poet and simply. In the opening of his "Long hero has flirted - but not so as to endanVacation Pastoral" there is a passage ger her peace is "consoled" by this describing the speech of the Highland gorgeous youth in the mazes of the Scotch chieftain not a very grammatical speech, reel: but a thoroughly hearty speech, encountering difficulties at every word, and at every word boldly overcoming them: Spare me, O great Recollection! for words to the task were unequal,

Spare me, O mistress of Song ! nor bid me remember minutely

All that was said and done o'er the well-mixed tempting toddy;

How were healths proposed and drunk "with all the honors,"

Glasses and bonnets waving, and three-timesthree thrice over,

Queen, and Prince, and Army, and Landlords all, and Keepers;

Bid me not, grammar defying, repeat from
grammar-defiers

Long constructions strange and plusquam-
Thucydidean,

Tell how, as sudden torrent in time of speat in
the mountain

Hurries six ways at once, and takes at last to the roughest,

Or as the practised rider at Astley's or Fran

coni's

When
He, like a god, came leaving his ample Olym-
pian chamber.

the fourwheel for ten minutes already
had stood at the gateway,

Is it, O marvel of marvels! he too in the maze

of the mazy,

Skipping, and tripping, though stately, though
Airlie, with sight of the waistcoat the golden-
languid, with head on one shoulder,
Katie, who simple and comely, and smiling
haired Katie consoling?
What though she wear on that neck a blue
and blushing as ever,
Seems in her maidenly freedom to need small
kerchief remembered as Philip's,

consolement of waistcoats!

Or take this, again, in which one of the party-generally supposed to have been the same who afterwards became a Tory chancellor of the exchequer, now, alas! no more—is described dancing in his illfitting Highland costume:

Him rivalling, Hobbes, briefest-kilted of heroes,

Enters, O stoutest, O rashest of creatures, mere fool of a Saxon,

Skill-less of philibeg, skill-less of reel, too, –
the whirl and the twirl o't:
Him see I frisking, and whisking, and ever at
swifter gyration

Under brief curtain revealing broad acres —
not of broad-cloth.

I do not think it would be possible for
either rhythm or words to express more
frisks in an unsuitable costume.
vividly the absurdity of a bulky Saxon's

But this peculiar metre suited Clough for better reasons than these. I may say that there is no verse like the hexame