tribute: "Beautiful city! so venerable,
so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our
century, so serene!

'There are our young barbarians all at play!'

And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her garments to
the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantment of
the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm,
keeps ever calling us nearer the true goal of all of us, to the ideal,
to perfection--to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from
another side?... Home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs and
unpopular names and impossible loyalties! what example could ever so
inspire us to keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher
could ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all prone,
that bondage which Goethe, in his incomparable lines on the death of
Schiller, makes it his friend's highest praise ... to have left miles
out of sight behind him: the bondage of 'was uns alle baendigt, Das
Gemeine'?"

=20.= Compare with Lowell's lines on June, in _The Vision of Sir
Launfal_.

=22-23.= Explain.

=24. Once pass'd I blindfold here.= That is, at one time I could have
passed here blindfolded, being so familiar with the country. Can you
think of any other possible interpretation?

=26-30.= Explain.

=31-40.= Compare the thought here to that of Milton's _Lycidas_, ll.
23-38. A comparison of the two poems entire, in thought and structure,
will be found to be both interesting and profitable. =Shepherd-pipe=
(l. 35). The term =pipe=, also reed (l. 78), is continually used in
pastoral verse as symbolic of poetry and song. [206]

=38-45. Needs must I lose them=, etc. That is, I must lose them, etc.
Arnold's great ambition was to devote his life to literature, which
circumstances largely prevented; while Clough was eager to take a more
active part in life, not being content with the uneventful career of a
poet, =irk'd= (l. 40). Annoyed; worried. =keep= (l. 43). Here used in
the sense of remain, =silly= (l. 45). Harmless; senseless. The word has
an interesting history.

=46-50=. Like Arnold, Clough held lofty ideals of life, and grieved to
see men living so far below their privileges. This, with his loss
of faith in God, tinged his poetry with sadness. The storms (l. 49)
allude to the spiritual, political, and social unrest of the last of
the first half, and first of the last half, of the nineteenth century.