"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:-- "I will look straight out, see things, not try to evade them: Fact shall be Fact for me; and the Truth the Truth as ever, Flexible, changeable, vague, and multiform and doubtful." Or, again,-- "Ah, the key of our life, that passes all wards, opens all locks, Is not _I will_, but _I must_. I must,--I must, --and I do it." And still again,-- "But for the steady fore-sense of a freer and larger existence, Think you that man could consent to be circumscribed here into action? But for assurance within of a limitless ocean divine, o'er Whose great tranquil depths unconscious the wind-tost surface Breaks into ripples of trouble that come and change and endure not,-- But that in this, of a truth, we have our being, and know it, Think you we men could submit to live and move as we do here?"