on. At this, as at every period of his life, he
enjoyed the warm respect and admiration of a small circle of friends,
who learnt to look to him alike for unselfish sympathy and for spiritual
and practical wisdom. In 1860 his health began to fail. He visited first
Malvern and Freshwater, and then the East, France and Switzerland, in
search of recovery, and finally came to Florence, where he was struck
down by malaria and paralysis, and died on the 13th of November 1861.
Matthew Arnold wrote upon him the exquisite lament of _Thyrsis_.

Shortly before he left Oxford, in the stress of the Irish potato-famine,
Clough wrote an ethical pamphlet addressed to the undergraduates, with
the title, _A Consideration of Objections against the Retrenchment
Association at Oxford_ (1847). His Homeric pastoral _The Bothie of
Toper-na-Fuosich_, afterwards rechristened _Tober-na-Vuolich_ (1848),
was inspired by a long vacation after he had given up his tutorship, and
is full of socialism, reading-party humours and Scottish scenery.
_Ambarvalia_ (1849), published jointly with his friend Thomas Burbidge,
contains shorter poems of various dates from 1840, or earlier, onwards.
_Amours de Voyage_, a novel in verse, was written at Rome in 1849;
_Dipsychus_, a rather amorphous satire, at Venice in 1850; and the
idylls which make up _Mari Magno, or Tales on Board_, in 1861. A few
lyric and elegiac pieces, later in date than the _Ambarvalia_, complete
the tale of Clough's poetry. His only considerable enterprise in prose
was a revision of the 17th century translation of Plutarch by Dryden and
others, which occupied him from 1852, and was published as _Plutarch's
Lives_ (1859).

No part of Clough's life was wholly given up to poetry, and he probably
had not the gift of detachment necessary to produce great literature in
the intervals of other occupations. He wrote but little, and even of
that little there is a good deal which does not aim at the highest
seriousness. He never became a great craftsman. A few of his best lyrics
have a strength of melody to match their depth of thought, but much of
what he left consists of rich ore too imperfectly fused to make a
splendid or permanent possession. Nevertheless, he is rightly regarded,
like his friend Matthew Arnold, as one of the most typical English poets
of the middle of the 19th century. His critical instincts and strong
ethical temper brought him athwart the popular ideals of his day both in
conduct