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.”  It is in such poems as the “Qua Cursum Ventus,” or the sonnet beginning, “Well, well,—­Heaven bless you all from day to day!” that it is to be read.  These, with a few other fugitive pieces, were printed, in company with verses by a friend, as one part of a small volume entitled, “Ambarvalia,” which never attained any general circulation, although containing some poems which will take their place among the best of English poetry of this generation.

  “Qua Cursum Ventus.

  “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, O blithe breeze! and O 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: 
  O bounding breeze!  O 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.”  A part of his experiences and his thoughts while at Rome are interwoven with the story in his “Amours de Voyage,” a poem which exhibits in extraordinary measure the subtilty and delicacy of his powers, and the fulness of his sympathy with the intellectual conditions of the time.  It was first published in the “Atlantic Monthly” for 1858, and was at once established in the admiration of readers capable of appreciating its rare and refined excellence.  The spirit of the poem is thoroughly characteristic of its author, and the speculative, analytic turn of his mind is represented in many passages of the letters of the imaginary hero.  Had he been writing in his own name, he could not have uttered his inmost conviction more distinctly, or have given the clue to his intellectual life more openly than in the following verses:—­