Chapter III.
Clough.

In turning from Browning to Clough we turn to a smaller poet, it is true, but to a spirit no less cheery, courageous and truthful; indeed if a single adjective had to be chosen to sum up Clough's most characteristic merits it seems to me that that adjective would be healthy; true of all his verse it is especially true of all the sea poetry that forms do large a part of his work. Everywhere the atmosphere is

wholesome, salt, breezy, invigorating,

the atmosphere of

the sea from the standpoint of health, if not of aesthetics. This interpretation of the sea-atmosphere is the more re

markable when we consider that he uses the sea very

largely in simile and allegory.

There is very little de

scription,- a somewhat surprising fact when the spirited descriptive passages of the Bothie are called to mind; but the sea's beauty seems to have occupied him very little; what he did feel and with great keeness, was the strength, the largeness, the healthfulness, of the sea, and together with this the great suggestiveness of the voyage in the realm of spiritual things. The few adjectives that he uses are characteristic; the most common are great and salt: great strong tide (the Bothie), great salt tide (Ibid),

great salt sea (Ibid) great windy waters (Amours de Voyage),

great still sea (Ibid), salt sea (Ibid), great waters (Dipsychus, sc.V.), salt sea-foam (Come home, come home).

The tide seems to have made a very strong impression upon. his imagination, inspiring him to no fewer than seven similes, one of which is certainly among the finest in Engthe well known "Say not the struggle nought

lish verse,

availeth",

"For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

There are three tide-similes in the Bothie; in one Elspie

likens Phillip's love to the high springtide forcing its way up the quiet stream of sweet inland water, stoppảng it and driving it backward so that the "poor slender burnie" can run no more on its peaceful way; a few lines farther on the simile is continued in a fine passage describing the ebb of the great salt tide,

"That great power withdrawn, receding here and passive, Felt she in myriad springs, her sources far in the

mountains, Stirring, collecting, rising, upheaving, forth out-flowing, Taking and joining, right welcome, that delicate rill in the valley, Filling it, making it strong, and still descending,

seeking,