details, and even all certainty as to the issue, we should say that this was a case for the application of the rule, that of two contradictory statements we should accept that one which, if true, could most easily have given rise to the other. The Spartan story is most exquisite as a poem ; but looked at historically it reads very like an ingenious explanation of a Spartan defeat. Both versions agree in saying that Othryadês died and Alkênôr survived, indeed that all the Spartans died and that two Argives survived. The Argives give a version into which these admitted facts fit naturally. The Spartans give one which reads like an afterthought. Why should Alkênôr make such a mistake? Why, as Sir Cornewall Lewis pertinently asks, should Othryadês, if victorious, kill himself? Again, when, more than a hundred years after, the proposal for another combat of the same sort is made, the proposal comes from Argos, and was rather unwillingly assented to by Sparta. It seems to us that, instead of utter uncertainty as to the issue of the battle, there is a strong balance of probability for the belief that its issue was favourable to Argos.

We decline, therefore, implicitly to pledge ourselves either to Mr. Cox's Greek scepticism or to Sir Cornewall Lewis's Barbarian scepticism. But still less do we pledge ourselves to believe in all that Professor Rawlinson gives us as Assyrian and Egyptian history. We had rather leave matters open for a while. The Barbarians have had it too much their own way for some time, and Sir Cornewall Lewis has done good service by giving them a check. Truth must gain by his interposition. If they cannot answer him, truth gains in one way; if they can answer him, it gains in another. The time is come for some very doubtful theories to be definitely proved or disproved. As yet we wish only to open the questions, and not to decide them either way. But we have no doubt whatever as to the irrelevancy of all this Oriental matter, true or false, in an edition or translation of Herodotus. Professor Rawlinson seems to us rash in believing all his brother's discoveries; he is clearly injudicious in dragging them in where, in any case, they are not wanted. The scepticism both of Sir Cornewall Lewis and Mr. Cox is probably excessive; but it is certain that they fully understand the relations of the different parts of the world's history to one another. is equally certain that Professor Rawlinson does not. He has smothered his author under a mass of cumbrous and irrelevant learning, and has slurred over all the subjects on which an English reader of Herodotus really needed a guide.

It

ART. IV. MR. CLOUGH'S POEMS.

Poems. By Arthur Hugh Clough, sometime Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. With a Memoir. Macmillan.

No one can be more rigid than we are in our rules as to the publication of remains and memoirs. It is very natural that the friends of a cultivated man who seemed about to do something, but who died before he did it, should desire to publish to the world the grounds of their faith, and the little symptoms of his immature excellence. But though they act very naturally, they act very unwisely. In the present state of the world there are too many half-excellent people: there is a superfluity of persons who have all the knowledge, all the culture, all the requisite taste,-all the tools, in short, of achievement, but who are deficient in the latent impulse and secret vigour which alone can turn such instruments to account. They have all the outward and visible signs of future success; they want the invisible spirit, which can only be demonstrated by trial and victory. Nothing, therefore, is more tedious or more worthless than the posthumous delineation of the possible successes of one who did not succeed. The dreadful remains of nice young persons which abound among us prove almost nothing as to the future fate of those persons if they had survived. We can only tell that any one is a man of genius by his having produced some work of genius. Young men must practise themselves in youthful essays; and to some of their friends these may seem. works not only of fair promise, but of achieved excellence. The cold world of critics and readers will not, however, think so; that world well understands the distinction between promise and performance, and sees that these laudable juvenilia differ from good books as much as legitimate bills of exchange differ from actual cash.

If we did not believe that Mr. Clough's poems, or at least several of them, had real merit, not as promissory germs, but as completed performances, it would not seem to us to be within our province to notice them. Nor if Mr. Clough were now living among us, would he wish us to do so. The marked peculiarity, and, so to say, the flavour of his mind, was a sort of truthful scepticism, which made him anxious never to overstate his own assurance of any thing; disinclined him to overrate the doings of his friends; and absolutely compelled him to underrate his own past writings, as well as his capability for future literary success. He could not have borne to have his poems

reviewed with "nice remarks" and sentimental epithets of insincere praise. He was equal to his precept :

"Where are the great, whom thou wouldst wish to praise thee?

Where are the pure, whom thou wouldst choose to love thee?

Where are the brave, to stand supreme above thee,

Whose high commands would cheer, whose chiding raise thee?
Seek, seeker, in thyself; submit to find

In the stones bread, and life in the blank mind."

To offer petty praise and posthumous compliments to a stoic of this temper is like buying sugar-plums for St. Simon Stylites. We venture to write an article on Mr. Clough, because we believe that his poems depict an intellect in a state which is always natural "to such a being as man in such a world as the present," which is peculiarly natural to us just now; and because we believe that many of these poems are very remarkable for true vigour and artistic excellence, although they certainly have several defects and shortcomings, which would have been lessened, if not removed, if their author had lived longer and had written more.

In a certain sense there are two great opinions about every thing. There are so about the universe itself. The world as we know it is this. There is a vast, visible, indisputable sphere, of which we never lose the consciousness, of which no one seriously denies the existence, about the most important part of which most people agree tolerably and fairly. On the other hand, there is the invisible world, about which men are not agreed at all, which all but the faintest minority admit to exist somehow and somewhere, but as to the nature or locality of which there is no efficient popular demonstration; there is no such compulsory argument as will force the unwilling conviction of any one disposed to denial. As our minds rise, as our knowledge enlarges, as our wisdom grows, as our instincts deepen, our conviction of this invisible world is daily strengthened, and our estimate of its nature is continually improved. But-and this is the most striking peculiarity of the whole subject-the more we improve, the higher we raise, the nobler we conceive the unseen world which is in us and about us, in which we live and move, the more unlike that world becomes to the world which we do see. The divinities of Olympus were in a very plain and intelligible sense part and parcel of this earth; they were better specimens than could be found below, but they belonged to extant species; they were better editions of visible existences; they were like the heroines whom young men imagine after the young ladies of their vicinity-they were better and handsomer, but they were of the same sort; they had never been seen, but they might have been

seen any day. So too of the God with whom the Patriarch wrestled: he might have been wrestled with even if he was not; he was that sort of person. If we contrast with these the God of whom Christ speaks-the God who has not been seen at any time, whom no man hath seen or can see, who is infinite in nature, whose ways are past finding out, the transition is palpable. We have passed from gods-from an invisible world which is similar to, which is a natural appendix to, the world in which we live, and we have come to believe in an invisible world, which is altogether unlike that which we see, which is certainly not opposed to our experience, but is altogether beyond and unlike our experience; which belongs to another set of things altogether; which is, as we speak, transcendental. The "possible" of early barbarism is like the reality of early barbarism; the " may be," the "great perhaps," of late civilisation, is most unlike the earth, whether barbaric or civilised.

Two opinions as to the universe naturally result from this fundamental contrast. There are plenty of minds like that of Voltaire, who have simply no sense or perception of the invisible world whatever, who have no ear for religion, who are in the technical sense unconverted, whom no conceivable process could convert without altering what to bystanders and ordinary observers is their identity. They are, as a rule, acute, sensible, discerning, and humane; but the first observation which the most ordinary person would make as to them is, that they are "limited;" they understand palpable existence; they elaborate it, and beautify and improve it; but an admiring bystander who can do none of these things, who can beautify nothing, who, if he tried, would only make what is ugly uglier, is conscious of a latent superiority which he can hardly help connecting with his apparent inferiority. We cannot write Voltaire's sentences; we cannot make things as clear as he made them; but we do not much care for our deficiency. Perhaps we think "things ought not to be so plain as all that." There is a hidden, secret, unknown side to this universe, which these picturesque painters of the visible, these many-handed manipulators of the palpable, are not aware of, which would spoil their dexterity if it were displayed to them. Sleep-walkers can tread safely on the very edge of any precipice; but those who see, cannot. On the other hand, there are those whose minds have not only been converted, but in some sense inverted. They are so occupied with the invisible world as to be absorbed in it entirely; they have no true conception of that which stands plainly before them; they never look coolly at it, and are cross with those who do; they are wrapt up in their own faith as to an unseen existence; they rush upon mankind with,

"Ah, there it is! there it is!-don't you see it?" and so incur the ridicule of an age.

The best of us try to avoid both fates. We strive, more or less, to "make the best of both worlds." We know that the invisible world cannot be duly discerned, or perfectly appreciated. We know that we see as in a glass darkly; but still we look on the glass. We frame to ourselves some image which we know to be incomplete, which probably is in part untrue, which we try to improve day by day, of which we do not deny the defects, but which nevertheless is our "all;" which we hope, when the accounts are taken, may be found not utterly unlike the unknown reality. This is, as it seems, the best religion for finite beings, living, if we may say so, on the very edge of two dissimilar worlds, on the very line on which the infinite, unfathomable sea surges up, and just where the queer little bay of this world ends. We count the pebbles on the shore, and image to ourselves as best we may the secrets of the great deep.

There are, however, some minds (and of these Mr. Clough's was one) which will not accept what appears to be an intellectual destiny. They struggle against the limitations of mortality, and will not condescend to use the natural and needful aids of human thought. They will not make their image. They struggle after an "actual abstract." They feel, and they rightly feel, that every image, every translation, every mode of conception by which the human mind tries to place before itself the Divine mind, is imperfect, halting, changing. They feel, from their own experience, that there is no one such mode of representation which will suit their own minds at all times, and they smile with bitterness at the notion that they could contrive an image which will suit all other minds. They could not become fanatics or missionaries, or even common preachers, without forfeiting their natural dignity, and foregoing their very essence. To cry in the streets, to uplift their voice in Israel, to be "pained with hot thoughts," to be "preachers of a dream," would reverse their whole cast of mind. It would metamorphose them into something which omits every striking trait for which they were remarked, and which contains every trait for which they were not remarked. On the other hand, it would be quite as opposite to their whole nature to become followers of Voltaire. No one knows more certainly and feels more surely that there is an invisible world, than those very persons who decline to make an image or representation of it, who shrink with a nervous horror from every such attempt when it is made by any others. All this inevitably leads to what common practical people term a "curious" sort of mind. You do not know how to describe these "universal negatives," as they seem to be.