ABSTRACT
The author of these poems [The Bothie and Ambarvalia] has lately died, leaving a very high reputation in a very narrow circle. His was the old case of a boy who outshines and surpasses other boys—of a young man whose life seems full of promise—and then of a grown man in whom the promise seems to fade away, and who, if he does anything to reveal his powers to the outer world, does far less than his friends hoped for. Sometimes a disappointment of this sort is due to there being nothing really in the character or mind of the man that has any permanent value; and then no career can be much less interesting. But sometimes, as in the case of Mr. Clough, the failure is due to the particular type of the mind—to an excess of feeling and scrupulousness and intellectual activity, and a deficiency in clearness of thought, in the gift of expression, and in physical spirits. In 1849, Mr. Clough published a small volume of poems, which were, in some measure, a record of the struggles and trials through which he had passed. His friends found a few striking passages in them, an enormous preponderance of obscure and confused meditations, and a very unequal power of versification. The world at last never read them at all; but within the circle to which Mr. Clough was known in England and America, these poems made no difference in the general impression he produced on those who came in intimate contact with his high thoughts, his proud and shy bearing, and his intense love of truth. Now that he is gone, the general public is not likely to care much for his poems, even if the only poetical work he produced of real interest—his Long Vacation Pastoral—which has long been out of print, were again issued. But when a man has a high position in a small knot of friends, it is always interesting to know why he has it. It is not by accident that men win the confidence and admiration of their friends; and as Mr. dough's friends included many persons of eminence both here and on the other side of the Atlantic, it cannot be quite in vain to ask what are the qualities of heart and head that give a man high standing in such a circle, even when it is acknowledged that he has done nothing appreciable by strangers to justify the estimation in which he is held. It so happens, also, that Mr. Clough's career is bound up in a very marked way with the recent history of Oxford. What he felt and did and thought is very illustrative of all that was going on in his University during his early manhood; and as the future historian of English thought cannot possibly omit to notice the general features of an intellectual movement so conspicuous in its time as that which has been going on at Oxford during the last thirty years, every biography and every notice of men who have been participators in, or have been conspicuously affected by this movement, has a sort of adventitious value.
