Arthur Hugh Clough

“ Stepping through mossy stones by the runnel under the alders,
Loitering unconsciously, Philip, she said, I will not be a lady;
We will do work together—you do not wish me a lady.
It is a weakness perhaps and a foolishness; still it is so;
I have been used all my life to help myself and others;
I could not bear to sit and be waited on by footmen,
No, not even by women—
And God forbid, he answered,
God forbid you should ever be aught but yourself, my Elspie!
As for service, I love it not, I; your weakness is mine too,
I am sure Adam told you as much as that about me. ”

“ Barefoot, barelegged, he beheld her, with arms bare up to the elbows,
Bending with fork in her hand in a garden uprooting potatoes?
Is not Katie as Rachel, and is not Philip a Jacob?
Truly Jacob, supplanting a hairy Highland Esau?
Shall he not, love-entertained, feed sheep for the Laban of Rannoch?
Patriarch happier he, the long servitude ended of wooing,
If when he wake in the morning he find not a Leah beside him!
But the Tutor inquired, who had bit his lip to bleeding,
How far off is the place? who will guide me thither to-morrow? ”

“ If there is battle, ’tis battle by night, I stand in the darkness,
Here in the mêlée of men, Ionian and Dorian on both sides,
Signal and password known; which is friend and which is foeman?
Is it a friend? I doubt, though he speak with the voice of a brother.
Still you are right, I suppose; you always are, and will be;
Though I mistrust the Field-Marshal, I bow to the duty of order.
Yet is my feeling rather to ask, where is the battle?
Yes, I could find in my heart to cry, notwithstanding my Elspie,
O that the armies indeed were arrayed! O joy of the onset! ”

“ Adam. My love,
Blessed be this good day to thee indeed;
Blessed the balm of joy unto thy soul.
A sad unskilful nurse was I to thee;
But nature teaches mothers, I perceive.
Eve. But you, my husband, you meantime, I feel,
Join not your perfect spirit in my joy.
No; your spirit mixes not, I feel, with mine.
Adam. Alas! sweet love, for many a weary day,
You and not I have borne this heavy weight:
How can I, should I, might I feel your bliss,
Now heaviness is changed to glory? ”

“ I am afraid; but believe in you; and I trust to the teacher;
You have done all things gravely and temperate, not as in passion;
And the teacher is prudent, and surely can tell what is likely.
What my father will say, I know not; we will obey him:
But for myself, I could dare to believe all well, and venture.
O Mr. Philip, may it never hereafter seem to be different!
And she hid her face—
Oh, where, but in Philip’s bosom!
After some silence, some tears too perchance, Philip laughed, and said to her,
So, my own Elspie, at last you are clear that I’m bad enough for you
Ah! ”

“ Yes, were here, as of old; the light-giving orb of the household,
Arthur, the shapely, the tranquil, the strength-and-contentment diffusing,
In the pure presence of whom none could quarrel long, nor be pettish,
And, the gay fountain of mirth, their dearly beloved of Pipers;
Yes, they were come, were here: but Hewson and Hope—where they then?
Are they behind, travel-sore, or ahead, going straight, by the pathway?
And from his seat and cigar spoke the Piper, the Cloud-compeller.
Hope with the uncle abideth for shooting. Ah me, were I with him! ”

“ For He that asked me, Where is Abel? He
Who called me cursed from the earth, and said
A fugitive and vagabond thou art,
He also said, when fear had slain my soul,
There shall not touch thee man nor beast. Fear not.
Lo, I have spoke with God, and He hath said.
Fear not;—and let me go as He hath said.
Cain also said (O Jubal, touch thy string) ,—
Moreover, in the darkness of my mind,
When the night’s night of misery was most black,
A little star came twinkling up within,
And in myself I had a guide that led,
And in myself had knowledge of a soul.
Fear not, O Adam and O Eve: I go. ”

“ However noble the dream of equality, mark you, Philip,
Nowhere equality reigns in all the world of creation,
Star is not equal to star, nor blossom the same as blossom;
Herb is not equal to herb, any more than planet to planet.
There is a glory of daisies, a glory again of carnations;
Were the carnation wise, in gay parterre by greenhouse,
Should it decline to accept the nurture the gardener gives it, [213]
Should it refuse to expand to sun and genial summer,
Simply because the field-daisy that grows in the grass-plat beside it,
Cannot, for some cause or other, develop and be a carnation? ”

“ Till, the brief winter o’er-past, her own true sap in the springtide
Rise, and the tree I have bared be verdurous e’en as aforetime!
Surely it may be, it should be, it must be. Yet ever and ever,
Would I were dead, I keep saying, that so I could go and uphold her!
No, wherever be Katie, with Philip she is not: behold, for
Here he is sitting alone, and these are his words in the mountain.
And, at the farm on the lochside of Rannoch, in parlour and kitchen,
Hark! there is music—the flowing of music, of milk, and of whisky;
Lo, I see piping and dancing! ”

“ Assort itself upon the brain.
Travel’s a miniature life,
Travel is evermore a strife,
Where he must run who would obtain.
’Tis a perpetual loss and gain;
For sloth and error dear we pay,
By luck and effort win our way,
And both have need of every day.
Each day has got its sight to see,
Each day must put to profit be;
Pleasant, when seen are all the sights,
To let them think themselves to rights.
I on the Giesbach turf reclined,
Half watched this process in my mind,
Watch the stream purifying slow,
In me and in the lake below;
And then began to think of home,
And possibilities to come. ”

“ Rome will be here, and the Pope the custode of Vatican marbles.
I have no heart, however, for any marble or fresco;
I have essayed it in vain; ’tis in vain as yet to essay it:
But I may haply resume some day my studies in this kind;
Not as the Scripture says, is, I think, the fact. Ere our death-day,
Faith, I think, does pass, and Love; but Knowledge abideth.
Let us seek Knowledge;—the rest may come and go as it happens.
Knowledge is hard to seek, and harder yet to adhere to.
Knowledge is painful often; and yet when we know we are happy. ”

“ Ten more days did Adam with Philip abide at the changehouse,
Ten more nights they met, they walked with father and daughter.
Ten more nights, and night by night more distant away were
Philip and she; every night less heedful, by habit, the father.
Happy ten days, most happy: and, otherwise than intended,
Fortunate visit of Adam, companion and friend to David.
Happy ten days, be ye fruitful of happiness! Pass o’er them slowly,
Slowly; like cruse of the prophet be multiplied, even to ages!
Pass slowly o’er them, ye days of October; ye soft misty mornings,
Long dusky eves; pass slowly ”

“ They who with pure and humble eyes
Have gazed and read her lessons high,
And taught their spirits to be wise
In love and human sympathy,—
That they can soon and surely tell
When aught has gone amiss within, [4]
When the mind is not sound and well,
Nor the soul free from taint of sin.
For as God’s Spirit from above,
So Beauty is to them below,
And when they slight that holy love,
Their hearts that presence may not know.
So I turned home the way I came,
With downcast looks and heavy heart,
A guilty thing and full of shame,
With a dull grief that had no smart. ”

“ Adam. Be comforted; muddle not your soul with doubt.
’Tis done, it was to be done; if, indeed,
Other way than this there was, I cannot say:
This was one way, and a way was needs to be found.
That which we were we could no more remain
Than in the moist provocative vernal mould
A seed its suckers close and rest a seed;
We were to grow. Necessity on us lay
This way or that to move; necessity, too, [44]
Not to be over careful this or that,
So only move we should.
Come, my wife,
We were to grow, and grow I think we may,
And yet bear goodly fruit.
Eve. Oh, guilt! oh, guilt!
Adam. ”

“ Seek sadly what for Him ye left, go hopeless to your home;
Nor ye despair, ye sharers yet to be of their belief;
Though He be dead, He is not dead,
Nor gone, though fled,
Not lost, though vanished;
Though He return not, though
He lies and moulders low;
In the true creed
He is yet risen indeed;
Christ is yet risen.
Sit if ye will, sit down upon the ground,
Yet not to weep and wail, but calmly look around.
Whate’er befell,
Earth is not hell;
Now, too, as when it first began,
Life is yet life, and man is man. ”

“ In aught not felt immediate from himself.
But of a truth,
Your joy is greater—mine seems therefore none.
Eve. Nay, neither this I think nor that is true.
Evermore still you love to cheat me, Adam:
You hide from me your thoughts like evil beasts
Most foolishly; for I, thus left to guess,
Catch at all hints, and where perchance one is,
People the forest with a hundred ills,
Each worse perhaps a hundred times than it.
No; you have got some fearful thoughts—no, no;
Look not in that way on my baby, Adam—
You do it hurt; you shall not!
Adam. ”

“ With every accident he seems to move,
Is now below me and is now above,
Now far aside,—O, does he really love?’
‘Absence were hard; yet let the trial be;
His nature’s aim and purpose he would free,
And in the world his course of action see.
O should he lose, not learn; pervert his scope;
O should I lose! and yet to win I hope.
I win not now; his way if now I went,
Brief joy I gave, for years of discontent.’ [358]
‘Gone, is it true? but oft he went before,
And came again before a month was o’er. ”

“ Noble Manara slain, and Garibaldi has lost il Moro;—
Rome is fallen; and fallen, or falling, heroical Venice.
I, meanwhile, for the loss of a single small chit of a girl, sit
Moping and mourning here,—for her, and myself much smaller.
Whither depart the souls of the brave that die in the battle,
Die in the lost, lost fight, for the cause that perishes with them?
Are they upborne from the field on the slumberous pinions of angels
Unto a far-off home, where the weary rest from their labour,
And the deep wounds are healed, and the bitter and burning moisture [313]
Wiped from the generous eyes? ”

“ Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie.
Or may it be that I shall find my mate,
And he returning see himself too late?
For work we must, and what we see, we see,
And God he knows, and what must be, must be,
When sweethearts wander far away from me.
Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie.
The sky behind is brightening up anew
(Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie) ,
The rain is ending, and our journey too:
Heigho! aha! for here at home are we:—
In, Rose, and in, Provence and La Palie. ”