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,--

'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 guaranty 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 realities
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 massive forehead:--

'Blank misgivings of a creature moving about
in worlds not realized.'

"Nor did Clough's great powers ever rea