From a Cornish Window / A New Edition - Arthur Quiller-Couch

In the following year (1857) he married his cousin, Miss Stowell, daughter of Dr. Stowell, of Ramsay; and soon after left King William's College to become 'by some strange mischance' Head Master of the Crypt School, Gloucester. Of this "Gloucester episode," as he called it, nothing needs to be recorded except that he hated the whole business and, incidentally, that one of his pupils was Mr. W. E. Henley—destined to gather into his National Observer, many years later, many blooms of Brown's last and not least memorable efflorescence in poesy.

From Gloucester he was summoned, on a fortunate day, by Mr. Percival (now Bishop of Hereford), who had recently been appointed to Clifton College, then a struggling new foundation, soon to be lifted by him into the ranks of the great Public Schools. Mr. Percival wanted a man to take the Modern Side; and, as fate orders these things, consulted the friend reserved by fate to be his own successor at Clifton—Mr. Wilson (now Canon of Worcester). Mr. Wilson was an old King William's boy; knew Brown, and named him.

"Mr. Wilson having told me about him," writes the bishop, "I made an appointment to see him in Oxford, and there, as chance would have it, I met him standing at the corner of St. Mary's Entry, in a somewhat Johnsonian attitude, four-square, his hands deep in his pockets to keep himself still, and looking decidedly volcanic. We very soon came to terms, and I left him there under promise to come to Clifton as my colleague at the beginning of the following Term; and, needless to say, St. Mary's Entry has had an additional interest to me ever since. Sometimes I have wondered, and it would be worth a good deal to know, what thoughts were crossing through that richly-furnished, teeming brain as he stood there by St. Mary's Church, with Oriel College in front of him, thoughts of his own struggles and triumphs, and of all the great souls that had passed to and fro over the pavement around him; and all set in the lurid background of the undergraduate life to which he had been condemned as a servitor at Christ Church."

Was he happy in his many years' work at Clifton? On the whole, and with some reservation, we may say 'yes'—'yes,' although in the end he escaped from it gladly and enjoyed his escape. One side of him, no doubt, loathed formality and routine; he was, as he often proclaimed himself, a nature-loving, somewhat intractable Celt; and if one may hint at a fault in him, it was that now and then he soon tired. A man so spendthrift of emotion is bound at times to knock on the bottom of his emotional coffers; and no doubt he was true to a mood when he wrote—

"I'm here at Clifton, grinding at the mill
My feet for thrice nine barren years have trod,
But there are rocks and waves at Scarlett still,
And gorse runs riot in Glen Chass—thank God!
"Alert, I seek exactitude of rule,
I step and square my shoulders with the squad,
But there are blaeberries on old Barrule,
And Langness has its heather still—thank God!"

—With the rest of the rebellious stanzas. We may go farther and allow that he played with the mood until he sometimes forgot on which side lay seriousness and on which side humour. Still it was a mood; and it was Brown, after all, who wrote 'Planting':—

"Who would be planted chooseth not the soil
Or here or there,
Or loam or peat,
Wherein he best may grow
And bring forth guerdon of the planter's toil—
The lily is most fair,
But says not' I will only blow
Upon a southern land'; the cedar makes no coil
What rock shall owe
The springs that wash his feet;
The crocus cannot arbitrate the foil
That for his purple radiance is most meet—
Lord, even so
I ask one prayer,
The which if it be granted,
It skills not where
Thou plantest me, only I would be planted."