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The reader will remember, as he reads it, that he is in the troubled year of 1848, with Chartism at home and revolution abroad. The "painful interest" with which the writer has read Clough's "Bothie" refers, I think, to the fact that she has recognized her second son, my father, as to some extent the hero of the poem. Fox How, Nov. 19, 1848.
It was about this time that the most widely known of his works, "The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, a Long-Vacation Pastoral," was written. It was published in 1848, and though it at once secured a circle of warm admirers, and the edition was very soon exhausted, it "is assuredly deserving of a far higher popularity than it has ever attained."
"Ye're busy harlin', Thomas," said Annie, for the sake of saying something. "Ay, jist helpin' to mak' a heepocreet," answered Thomas, with a nod and a grim smile, as he threw a trowelful of mortar mixed with small pebbles against the wall. "What mean ye by that?" rejoined Annie. "Gin ye kent this auld bothie as weel as I do, ye wadna need to spier that question.
Only in my father's life there had been as yet no parallel to the charming love-story of "The Bothie." His love-story awaited him on the other side of the world.
He was still in many respects the Philip of the "Bothie," influenced by Goethe, and the French romantics, by Emerson, Kingsley, and Carlyle, and in touch still with all that Liberalism of the later 'forties in Oxford, of which his most intimate friend, Arthur Clough, and his elder brother, Matthew Arnold, were to become the foremost representatives.
So a' set oot an' ransackit the parish till a' got him, an' gin he wesna sittin' in a bothie takin' brose wi' the plowmen an' expoundin' Scripture a' the time.
Paul's Cross pulpit was occupied one Sunday by a Lutheran, the next by a Catholic, the next by a Calvinist, all sides had a hearing, and the preachers knew that they would be pulled up before the same audience for what they might say." His own literary judgments were rather conventional. The mixture of classes in Clough's Bothie disturbed him.
The little volume of miscellaneous poems, called Ambarvalia, and the "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuo-lich" were sent out to New Zealand by Clough, at the same moment that Matt was sending his brother the Poems by A. Clough writes from Liverpool in February, 1849 having just received Matt's volume: At last our own Matt's book! Read mine first, my child, if our volumes go forth together.
His poems, though full of fine and subtle thought, are, with the exception of some short lyrics, deficient in form, and the hexameters which he employed in The Bothie are often rough, though perhaps used as effectively as by any English verse-writer. M. Arnold's Thyrsis was written in memory of C. Theological and social writer, was b. near Dublin.
A shepherd on the hills of Scotland, who returns every night to his bothie, and finds a warm supper cooked for him by some kind female hand, is a prince compared to the exile of Australia, who comes home tired and sleepy at sun-down, and may then either chop wood to cook his meal, or go supperless to bed, as suits his fancy.
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