Among the prominent attributes of this poem is its completeness. The elaboration, not only of character and of mental discipline, but of incident also, is unbroken. The absences of all mention of Elspie in the opening scene and again at the dance at Rannoch may at first seem to be a failure in this respect; but second thoughts will show it to be far otherwise: for, in the former case, her presence would not have had any significance for Hewson, and, in the latter, would have been overlooked by him save so far as might warrant a future vague recollection, pre-occupied as his eyes and thoughts were by another. There is one condition still under which we have as yet had little opportunity of displaying this quality; but it will be found to be as fully carried out in the descriptions of nature. In the first of our extracts the worlds are few, but stand for many.
“Meäly glen, the heart of Lochiel's fair forest, Where Scotch firs are darkest and amplest, and intermingle Grandly with rowan and ash;—in Mar you have no ashes; There the pine is alone or relieved by birch and alder.”—p. 22.
In the next mere sound and the names go far towards the entire effect; but not so far as to induce any negligence in essential details:
“As, at return of tide, the total weight of ocean, Drawn by moon and sun from Labrador and Greenland, Sets in amain in the open space betwixt Mull and Scarfa, Heaving, swelling, spreading, the might of the mighty Atlantic; There into cranny and slit of the rocky cavernous bottom Settles down; and with dimples huge the smooth sea-surface Eddies, coils, and whirls, and dangerous Corryvreckan.”—p. 52.
Two more passages, and they must suffice as examples. Here the isolation is perfect; but it is the isolation, not of the place and the actors only; it is, as it were, almost our own in an equal degree;
“Ourselves too seeming Not as spectators, accepted into it, immingled, as truly Part of it as are the kine of the field lying there by the birches.” “There, across the great rocky wharves a wooden bridge goes, Carrying a path to the forest; below,—three hundred yards, say,— Lower in level some twenty-five feet, thro' flats of shingle, Stepping-stones and a cart-track cross in the open valley. But, in the interval here, the boiling pent-up water Frees itself by a final descent, attaining a bason Ten feet wide and eighteen long, with whiteness and fury Occupied partly, but mostly pellucid, pure, a mirror; Beautiful there for the color derived from green rocks under; Beautiful most of all where beads of foam uprising Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the stillness. Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendent birch-boughs, Here it lies, unthought of above at the bridge and pathway, Still more concealed from below by wood and rocky projection. You are shut in, left alone with yourself and perfection of water, Hid on all sides, left alone with yourself and the goddess of bathing.”—
“So they bathed, they read, they roamed in glen and forest; Far amid blackest pines to the waterfall they shadow, Far up the long long glen to the loch, and the loch beyond it Deep under huge red cliffs, a secret.”
In many of the images of this poem, as also in the volume “Ambarvalia,” the joint production of Clough and Thomas Burbidge, there is a peculiar moderness, a reference distinctly to the means and habits of society in these days, a recognition of every-day fact, and a willingness to believe it as capable of poetry as that which, but for having once been fact, would not now be tradition. There is a certain special character in passages like the following, the familiarity of the matter blending with the remoteness of the form of metre, such as should not be overlooked in attempting to estimate the author's mind and views of art:
“Still, as before (and as now), balls, dances, and evening parties,.... Seemed like a sort of unnatural up-in-the-air balloon work,.... As mere gratuitous trifling in presence of business and duty As does the turning aside of the tourist to look at a landscape Seem in the steamer or coach to the merchant in haste for the city.”—p. 12.
“I was as one that sleeps on the railway; one who, dreaming, Hears thro' his dream the name of his home shouted out,—hears and hears not, Faint, and louder again, and less loud, dying in distance,— Dimly conscious, with something of inward debate and choice, and Sense of [present] claim and reality present; relapses, Nevertheless, and continues the dream and fancy, while forward, Swiftly, remorseless, the car presses on, he knows not whither.”—p.38.