way,
Still more concealed from below by wood and rocky projection.
You are shut in, left alone with yourself and perfection of water,
Hid on all sides, left alone with yourself and the goddess of bathing."--

"So they bathed, they read, they roamed in glen and forest;
Far amid blackest pines to the waterfall they shadow,
Far up the long long glen to the loch, and the loch beyond it
Deep under huge red cliffs, a secret."

In many of the images of this poem, as also in the volume
"Ambarvalia," the joint production of Clough and Thomas Burbidge,
there is a peculiar moderness, a reference distinctly to the means
and habits of society in these days, a recognition of every-day fact,
and a willingness to believe it as capable of poetry as that which,
but for having once been fact, would not now be tradition. There is a
certain special character in passages like the following, the
familiarity of the matter blending with the remoteness of the form of
metre, such as should not be overlooked in attempting to estimate the
author's mind and views of art:

"Still, as before (and as now), balls, dances, and evening parties,....
Seemed like a sort of unnatural up-in-the-air balloon work,....
As mere gratuitous trifling in presence of business and duty
As does the turning aside of the tourist to look at a landscape
Seem in the steamer or coach to the merchant in haste for the city."
--p. 12.

"I was as one that sleeps on the railway; one who, dreaming,
Hears thro' his dream the name of his home shouted out,--hears
and hears not,
Faint, and louder again, and less loud, dying in distance,--
Dimly conscious, with something of inward debate and choice, and
Sense of [present] claim and reality present; relapses,
Nevertheless, and continues the dream and fancy, while forward,
Swiftly, remorseless, the car presses on, he knows not whither."
--p.38.

Indeed, the general adaptation of the style to the immediate matter,
the alternation of the poetic and the familiar, with a certain
mixture even of classical phrase and allusion, is highly appropriate,
and may almost be termed constant, except in occasional instances
where more poetry, and especially more conception and working out of
images, is introduced than squares with a strict observance of
nature. Thus the lines quoted where Elspie applies to herself the
incident of "the high new bridge" and "the great key-stone in the
middle" are su