“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 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 much 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:—­

  ’Say not the struggle nought availeth,
     The labor and the wounds are vain,
  The enemy faints not nor faileth,
     And as things have been things remain.

  ’Though hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
     It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
  Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
     And but for you possess the field.

  ’For though the tired wave, idly breaking,
     Seems here no tedious inch to gain,
  Far back, through creek 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.’”

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THEM?

We have many precedents upon the part of the “Guardian of Civilization,” which may or may not guide us.  Not to return to that age “whereunto the memory of man runneth not to the contrary,” “the day of King Richard our grandfather,” and to the Wars of the Roses, we will begin with the happy occasion of the Restoration of King Charles of merry and disreputable fame.  Since he came back to his kingdoms on sufferance and as a convenient compromise between anarchy and despotism, he could hardly afford the luxury of wholesale proscription.  What the returning Royalists could, they did.  It was obviously unsafe, as well as ungrateful, to hang General Monk in presence of his army, many of whom had followed the “Son of the Man” from Worcester Fight in hot pursuit, and had hunted him from thicket to thicket of Boscobel Wood.