Prose remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, with a selection from his letters and a memoir

by Arthur Hugh Clough

April 6.

To-day is the annual Fast-day, so my little class in Ethics goes to church instead and comes to me to-morrow. People all go to church to-day, and it is a sort of Sunday. Thanksgiving day in November and Fast-day in March or April are the two State religious observances in Massachusetts.

I am going to send a bit of the Mayflower which grows chiefly about Plymouth, where the Pilgrim Fathers landed, and it is called after their ship, ‘The Mayflower.’ They are rare. The spring is beautiful here also, though so slow. The American weeping elms are extremely graceful, with their long pendent branches hung thick with buds. There are sharpish frosts, however, at times, so that there is no appearance of leaf as yet, except upon these Mayflowers, which I think must have been specially sheltered or forced. I saw, by-the-by, a great bittern at Concord; it rose from a pond, and makes an odd noise, on account of which they call it the stake-driver. There were some Andromedas, just budding, covering all the banks of the pond.

General Pierce’s speech is not really at all aggressive; I believe he was forced to say something for his party, but he kept within the lines pretty well. They say that when he read the passage about territories that must become theirs, there was a general cheer; and when he went on to say that under his government no movement not perfectly fair and just should be made, there was a dead silence. Everett’s speech is made a good deal of; but I don’t think he’s up to the mark, and I believe the old Whigs are quite stranded. Circumstances may split the Democrats (Pierce’s people), and they may form into parties, one aggressive and the other conservative. Free soil, perhaps. For they say Mexico must be dropping in soon, and then there’ll be all the old question of Extension of Slave Area over again.

I am going to write an article in the ‘North American Review,’ on recent English poetry. I have been interrupted in my regular quiet Plutarch work, which suits me much better than reviewing Alexander Smith & Co. M. Arnold’s ‘Tristram’ has been giving me pleasure.

I have been reading Mrs. Gaskell’s ‘Ruth’; it is really very good, but it is a little too timid, I think. Ruth did well, but there is also another way, and a more hopeful way. Such at least is my feeling. I do not think she has got the whole truth. I do not think that such overpowering humiliation should be the result in the soul of the not really guilty, though misguided girl, any more than it should be, justly, in the judgment of the world.

I really am very comfortably settled, on very easy terms with the American world in general, and have nothing to complain of, except perhaps the fact which appears to be true everywhere, that to get a livelihood one must do work according to other people’s fancies, instead of one’s own, which of course are the best, but under the circumstances must give way.

Do you know the Nortons have been so good as to offer me house-room during their absence at Newport? so in three weeks’ time you must conceive of me as embowered among the pines of Shady Hill, about two-thirds of a mile from this present Mrs. Howe’s. It will be cooler too. July, August, and the beginning of September are the hot months.

April 28.

I have had a sort of rheumatic cold. The east winds come in, in the midst of the warmth, with damp icy chills from the icebergs. I have had similar sensations in Italy. This day four years I was in Rome, witnessing the battle in which the French got beaten.