Introductory
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ened, and, as the years went on to the sixties, it deepened more and more,
Into the midst of this whirlpool of thoughts and hopes and passions, political, social, ideal, democratic, but chiefly religious and theological, Clough and Arnold were cast. They came up to Oxford between 1836 and 1840, and remained there, absorbing Oxford and its battlings of thought into their very marrow: and they represent the tempestuous tossing of their time, especially in their early poems, far more than Tennyson or Browning seated above the strife and moving on larger lines were capable of doing.
