nd written, setting forth
the accidents which befell a 'Dutchman' in catching a fly.

THE POEMS OF ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. With a Memoir. By Charles Eliot
Norton. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1862.

Arthur Hugh Clough was an English gentleman of high university education
and honors, and gifted with liberal and progressive views in politics,
who, after distinguishing himself somewhat in his native land, resided
for one year in this country as an instructor at Cambridge, Mass. On
returning to England to take a place in the Education Department of the
Privy Council, he wrote: 'I am rather unwilling to be re-Englished after
once attaining that higher transatlantic development. However, _il faut
s'y soumettre_, I presume, though I fear I am embarked in the foundering
ship. I hope to heaven you'll get rid of slavery, and then I shouldn't
fear but you would really 'go ahead' in the long run. As for us and our
inveterate feudalism, it is not hopeful.'

It is needless to say that an English poet with such feelings must be,
if not vigorous, liberal, and original, at least ambitious of becoming
such, and this Clough is. A vigorous naturalism, such as is becoming
half the religion and all the art of the scholars and thinkers of the
present day, inspires every page. Truthful yet picturesque, he is more
than pleasant to read, he is good _to think_, and most relishing to
_feel_ with. Had he been a meaner mind, he would have been a mere Adam
Bede-ish pre-Raffaelite in word-painting--'the Bothie of
Taber-na-vuolich,' the first poem in this volume is often photographic
in its rural views, as well as in its characters. As it is, literal
nature is to him material for fresh brave thought. Through all his
poems, owing to this simple vigorous truth, and an innate sense of
refinement, he rises head and shoulders above the 'sweet-pretty' Miss
Nancy Coventry Patmores or spasmodic Alexander Smiths or other
cotemporary English stuff of later poetry.

England has of late years deluged and wearied us so much with thousand
times told tales of herself and her social life, and her writers have
run so _exceedingly_ in ruts, that there are few really thinking men in
America who have not begun to tire woefully of her endless novels and
worn-out poetry. We could write against the whole '_connu, connu_,' and
at the end a 'deliver us'--from evil it might be, certainly from no
great temptation. Let the world believe it--it _will_ some day--English
_t