ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.—IN MEMORL&M.

ANAME appears in our obituary of this week which we cannot allow to pass without notice in these pages. On Wednesday, the 13th instant, Arthur Hugh Clough died at Florence, aged forty- two.

Those of us who are at all acquainted with the English poetry of the last twenty years will recognize the author of some pieces which we do not hesitate to say will hereafter hold their place beside those of Tennyson and Browning. All who have of late years given time and attention to education, will know how single-minded and able a worker has gone from among us in the prime of manhood; while a very large circle of friends will mourn over one who was loved by all who ever knew him for the purity and nobleness of his heart and life, and reverenced for the great powers of an intellect as highly cul- tivated as it was profound and subtle, and for the laborious honesty with which he worked at whatever he took in hand. The wise man has said, "There is no inquisition in the grave, whether thou hast lived ten, or an hundred, or a thousand years ;" but it is not given to those who remain on this side of the great river to see the waters close over the noble among their brethren in full manhood, without a feeling of deep, almost bitter, regret for the loss of the undeveloped power of which they and the world have so much need. Arthur Hugh Clough was educated at Rugby, to which school he went very young, soon after Dr. Arnold had been elected head master. • He distinguished himself at once by gaining the only scho- larship which existed at that time, and which was open to the whole school wider the age of fourteen. Before he was sixteen he was at the head of the fifth form, and as that was the earliest age at which boys were then admitted into the sixth, had to wait for a year before coming under the personal tuition of the head master. He came in the next (school) generation to Stanley and Vaughan, and gained a reputation, if possible, even greater than theirs. At the yearly speeches, in the last year of his residence, when the prizes are given away in the presence of the school and the friends who gather on such occasions, Arnold took the almost unexampled course of ad- dressing him (when he and two fags went up to carry off his load of splendidly bound books), and congratulating him on having gained every honour which Rugby could bestow, and having also already distinguished himself and done the highest credit to his school at the University. He had just gained a scholarship. at Balliol, then, as now, the blue ribbon of undergraduates.

At school, although before all things a student, he had thoroughly entered into the life of the place, and before he left had gained su- preme influence with the boys. He was the leading contributor to the Rugby Magazine; and though a weakness in his ankles prevented him from taking a prominent part in the games of the place, was known as the best goal-keeper on record, a reputation which no boy could have gained without promptness and courage. He was also one of the best swimmers in the school, his weakness of ankle being no drawback here, and in his last half passed the crucial test of that day, by swimming from Swift's (the bathing-place of the sixth) to the mill on the Leicester road, and back again, between callings over.

He went to reside at Oxford when the whole University was in a ferment. The struggle of Alma Mater to humble or cast out the most remarkable of her sons, was at its height. Ward had not yet been arraigned for his opinions, and was a fellow and tutor of Balliol, and Newman was in residence at'Oriel, and incumbent of St. Mary's.

Clough's was a mind which, under any circumstances, would have thrown itself into the deepest speculative thought of its time. He seems soon to have passed through the mere ecclesiastical debatings to the deep questions which lay below them. There was one lesson— probably one only—which he had never been able to learn from his great master, viz. to acknowledge that there are problems which in- tellectually are not to be solved by man, and before these to sit down quietly. Whether it were from the harass of thought on such matters which interfered with his regular work, or from one of those strange miscarriages in the most perfect of examining machines, which every now and then deprives the best men of the highest honours, to the surprise of every one Clough missed his first class. But he com- pletely retrieved this academical mishap shortly afterwards by gaining an Oriel fellowship. In his new college, the college of Posey, Newman, Keble, Marriott, Wilberforce, presided over by Dr. Haw- kins, and in which the influence of Whately, Davidson, and Arnold had scarcely yet died out, he found himself in the very centre and eye. of the battle. His own convictions were by this time leading him far away from both sides in the Oxford contest ; he, however, ac- cepted a tutorship at the college, and all Who had the privilege of attending them will long remember his lectures on logic and ethics. His fault (besides a shy and reserved manner) was that he was much too long suffering to youthful philosophic coxcombry, and would rather encourage it by his gentle " Ah ! you think so," or, "Yes, but might not such and such be the case ?"

Probably his poem of the Bothie of Topernafaosich, written at

this time, is the most widely known of all his works, and is assuredly deserving of a far higher popularity than it has ever attained, in consequence of his neglect to republish it. It has been out of print since the first year of its publication. Any one who has read it will acknowledge that a tutorship at Oriel was not the place for the author. The intense love of freedom, the deep and hearty sympathy with the foremost thought of the time, the humorous dealing with old formulas and conventionalisms grown meaningless, which breathes in every line of the Bothie, shows this clearly enough. He would tell in after life, with much enjoyment, how the dons of the University who, hearing that he had something in the press, and knowing that his theological views were not wholly sound, were looking for a publication on the Articles, were astounded by the ap- pearance of that fresh and frolicsome poem. Oxford (at least the Oriel common room) and he were becoming more estranged daily. How keenly he felt the estrangement, not from Oxford, but from old friends about this time, can be read only in his own words. We make no excuse for giving this, one of the gems of his Ambarvalia, entire, as the book is scarcely known beyond his own circle :

Qua Cursum Freaks.

"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: " E'en so—but why the tale reveal Of those, whom year by year unchanged, Brief absence joined anew to feel, Astounded, soul from soul estranged.

"At dead of night their sails were filled, And onward each rejoicing steered- Ah, neither blame, for neither willed, Or wist, what first with dawn appeared !

" To veer, how vain ! On, onward strain, Brave barks ! In light, in darkness too, Through winds and tides one compass guides— To that, and your own selves, be true.

" But 0 blithe breeze ! and 0 great seas, Though ne'er, that earliest parting past, On your wide plain they join again, Together lead them home at last.

"One port, methought, alike they sought,

One purpose hold where'er they fare,- 0 bounding breeze, 0 rushing seas ! At last, at last, unite them there !"

In 1848-49, the revolutionary crisis came on Europe, and Clough's sympathies drew him with great earnestness into the struggles which were going on. He was in Paris directly after the barricades, and in Rome during the siege, where he gained the friendship of Saffi and other leading Italian patriots. His sympathies leaned strongly against the Manchester school of politics; indeed, he entertained and frequently expressed a warm antipathy to that spirit of com- petitive selfishness which the narrow economists are wont to praise. Soon afterwards he left Oxford and became the principal of University Hall, then just established in connexion with Uni- versity College, London. He remained at this post, Which however did not entirely suit him, till early in 1852. After leaving it he went to America, with the intention, we believe, of settling there, if an opportunity offered, and gained the friendship of the knot of men in New England whose names have made Boston and Cambridge (Massachusetts) famous—of Agassiz, Felton, Lowell, Longfellow, Emerson, and the rest of the brotherhood. A most graceful token of their friendship reached him soon after his return to England, on the occasion of his marriage to the granddaughter of the late Mr. William Smith, M.P. for Norwich, in the shape of a box full of presents for his wife, to which every one of them had contributed. He had been recalled by the news of his appointment to the office in the education branch of the Privy Council, which he held till his death. Besides the routine examination work, which he performed with his usual thoroughness and conscientiousness, he completed his careful revision of Plutarch's Lives in six volumes, which, with very characteristic precision and something also of scru- pulous modesty, he termed "the translation called Dryden's, corrected from the Greek, and revised by A. H. Clough." In fact, hoWever, this undertaking, which had been begun in Boston, consumed all the leisure of many years, and involved much anxious scholarship. His life in the Council-office was exceedingly laborious, for during all the latter part of his life he acted also as private secretary to Miss Nightingale, a near relative of his wife, devoting many hours, both before and after his professional duties were over, to aid her in those reforms of the military administration to which she has devoted the remaining energies of her overtasked life. His health, for a long time delicate, finally gave way in the latter months of last year, when he was ordered to travel for his health. But neither in France

nor in Greece did he find any permanent benefit, though for a time his wife, who had joined him about two months ago, had been satisfied with his progress. He caught a slight malaria fever on one of the Italian lakes, in October, and though he obtained the best medical aid at Florence, his exhausted constitution never rallied against the apparently trifling ailment. He has left a wife and three children to mourn his loss.

Every one who knew Clough even slightly—and some of the most eminent Oxford men of his day have expressed their profound grief for his loss—received the strongest impression of the unusual breadth and massiveness of his mind. Singularly simple and genial, he was unfortunately cast upon a self-questioning age, which led him to worry himself with constantly testing the veracity of his own emotions. He has delineated in four lines the impression which his habitual reluctance to converse on the deeper themes of life made upon those of his friends who were attracted by his frank simplicity. In one of his shorter poems he writes :

4, I said, my heart is all too soft •, He who would climb and soar aloft, Must needs keep ever at his side The tonic of a wholesome pride."

That expresses the man in a very remarkable manner. He had a kind of proud simplicity about him singularly attractive, and often singularly disappointing to those who longed to know him well He had a fear, which many would think morbid, of leaning much on the approbation of the world. And there is one remarkable passage in his poems in which he intimates that men who live on the good opinion of others might even be benefited by a crime which would rob them of that evil stimulant :

" Why so is good no longer good, but crime Our truest, best advantage, since it lifts us Out of the stifling gas of men's opinion Into the vital atmosphere of Truth, Where He again is visible, though in anger."

So eager was his craving for reality and perfect sincerity, so morbid his dislike even for the unreal conventional forms of life, that a mind quite unique in simplicity and truthfulness represents itself in his poems as

" Seeking in vain, in all my store, One feeling based on truth."

Indeed, he wanted to reach some guarantee for simplicity deeper than simplicity itself. We remember his principal criticism on

America, after returning from his residence in Massachusetts, was that the New Englanders were much simpler than the English, and that this was the great charm of New England society. His own habits

were of the same kind, sometimes almost austere in their simplicity. Luxury he disliked, and sometimes his friends thought him even ascetic.

This almost morbid craving for a firm base on the absolute re- alities of life was very wearing in a mind so self-conscious as Clough's, and tended to paralyze the expression of a certainly great genius. He heads some of his poems with a line from Wordsworth's great ode, which depicts perfectly the expression often written in

the deep furrows which sometimes crossed and crowded his mas- sive forehead,— "Blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized."

Nor did Clough's great powers ever realize themselves to his contemporaries by any outward sign at all commensurate with the profound impression which they produced in actual life. But if his powers did not, there was mach in his character that did produce its full effect.upon all who knew him. He never looked, even in time of severe trial, to his own interest or advancement. He never flinched from the worldly loss which his deepest convictions brought on him. Even when clouds were thick over his own head, and the ground beneath his feet seemed crumbling away, he could still bear witness to an eternal light behind the cloud, and tell others that there is solid ground to be reached in the end by the weary feet of all who will wait to be strong. Let him speak his own farewell in some of his latest lines, which have never yet been printed:

"Say not the straggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor fafleth, And as things have been things remain.

" Though hopes were dupes, fears may be liars, It may be in yon, smoke concealed Our comrades chase e'en now the fliers, E'en now possess the peaceful field ; "For though the tired wave, idly breaking, Seems here no tedious inch to gain,

Far back, through creak and inlet making, Came, silent flooding in, the main—

"And not through eastern windows only When daylight comes comes in the light, In front the sun climbs slow—how slowly !

But westward—look! the land is bright."