To take the traditional correspondentist notion of Truth with full seriousness, you must agree with Clough, that “It fortifies my soul to know/That, though I perish, Truth is so.” You must feel uneasy at William James’ suggestion that “ideas… become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience.” Those who resonate to Clough’s lines think of Truth - or, more precisely, Reality as it is in itself, the object accurately represented by true sentences - as an authority we must respect.