their brothers whose appeal, "That I may see, O Lord," has not been offered in vain.

[V]

Of Newman's best poems after 1845 there are three, of which two are non-religious. Heathen Greece is a song sung by the heroine of Callista as she works at her modelling in her brother's shop, and there are in it the beauty of the singer, the cadence of her soft voice, and something of the wistfulness that lay but half hidden in the blue depths of her eyes:

Where are the Islands of the Blest?

They stud the Ægean Sea.

And where the deep Elysian rest?

It haunts the vale where Peneus strong

Pours his incessant stream along,

While craggy ridge and mountain bare

Cut keenly through the liquid air,

And, in their own pure tints array'd,

Scorn earth's green robes which change and fade,
And stand in beauty undecay'd,

Guards of the bold and free.

For what is Afric, but the home
Of burning Phlegethon?

What the low beach and silent gloom,

And chilling mists of that dull river,

Along whose bank the thin ghosts shiver,-
The thin wan ghosts that once were men,-
But Tauris, Isle of moor and fen,

Or dimly traced by seamen's ken,
The pale-cliff'd Albion.

The rhythmic quality here shows Newman at his best and the visual appeal is as admirable as, alas! it is all too rare.

Once again Newman did the uncommon but admirable thing in a poem written to his old friend Edward Caswell, "a gift for the new year in return for his volume of Poems." If Newman actually bade farewell to Nature in his early thirties he returns to linger with her for an enchanting moment in this lyric, and in all his poems there is not another single line so perfect as that which describes each flower and blossom mirrored in the stream as "Lingering the live-long day in still delight." In that is the magic which he almost never attained in his verse, a touch of enchantment felt instinctively, as we feel it in the best of Wordsworth. The color is meager enough, but the skilfully interwoven liquids lend the lines a beautiful limpidity as of the overbrimming spring itself:

Once, o'er a clear calm pool,

The fulness of an overbrimming spring,
I saw the hawthorn and the chestnut fling
Their willing arms, of vernal blossoms full
And light green leaves: the lilac too was there,
The prodigal laburnum, dropping gold,
While the rich gorse along the turf crept near,
Close to the fountain's margin, and made bold
To peep into that pool, so calm and clear:-
As if well pleased to see their image bright
Reflected back upon their innocent sight;
Each flower and blossom shy

Lingering the live-long day in still delight,
Yet without touch of pride, to view,
Yea, with a tender, holy sympathy,
What was itself, yet was another too.

So on thy verse, my Brother and my Friend,
-The fresh upwelling of thy tranquil spirit,-
I see a many angel forms attend;

And gracious souls elect,

And thronging sacred shades, that shall inherit
One day the azure skies,

And peaceful saints, in whitest garments deck'd;
And happy infants of the second birth:-
These, and all other plants of paradise,

Thoughts from above, and visions that are sure,
And providences past, and memories dear,
In much content hang o'er that mirror pure,
And recognize each other's faces there,
And see a heaven on earth.

[VI]

On the origin of the Dream of Gerontius we find an interesting paragraph in the Recollections of Aubrey de Vere: "The Dream of Gerontius, as Newman informed me, owed its preservation to an accident. He had written it on a sudden impulse, put it aside, and forgotten it. The editor of a magazine wrote to him asking for a contribution. He looked into all his pigeon holes and found nothing theological; but in answering his correspondent, he added that he had come upon some verses which, if as editor he cared to have them, were at his command. The wise editor did care and they were published at once."

Gerontius appeared in the Month, in the April and May numbers, 1865, and steadily won its way to fame by its unique beauty as a masterpiece of its kind. Three years after its publication Sir Francis Doyle made it the subject of his inaugural address as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Swinburne (though temperamentally poles apart) praised it highly, and General Gordon during the fateful last days at Khartoum had a copy always with him and marked his favorite passages in pencil.

Throughout Newman's life the thought of death was never far from his mind, not that in itself it was a thing of terror, but that it would mean the drawing aside of the veil and the final face to face with God and His judgment. He wrote to Bowden in 1834: "What a

blessed thing it is to have died, if prepared! Who knows what is in store for him in that last cup!" And when Bowden had answered "Adsum" to the great call, Newman gazed upon him in tears as one to whom the invisible was now made clear while he was still left "among the shadows." In his sixties the thought grows more insistent and we find him deeply stirred, recalling the sudden end of Thackeray, and the death of Scott and of Southey, and conjecturing what took off Dean Swift, and "wondering what in old times people died of"-Abraham, and David "whose days drew nigh that he should die," and the others. As his birthdays approached, seemingly more swiftly with the years, he finds them "awful things now, as minute guns by night"; and when in 1871 he writes to Henry Wilberforce he remarks, "One passes year by year over one's death day" and "wonders what day he shall die on."

During the tense period of the Achilli trial Newman was beset with the thought that he faced a grave physical crisis and so frail did he become that his friends feared a collapse which would prove fatal. Again the same thoughts filled his mind during the years of eclipse between the ill-starred attempt to establish a University in Ireland and the publication of the Apologia, and it is not strange that the emotions which death and its tremendous meaning always aroused in him should find a voice. The Dream of Gerontius was written in three weeks with (significant fact in many ways) hardly an

erasure.

The fears and hopes that had dwelt with Newman all his life and now were audible in Gerontius were not without foreshadowings in earlier works. We find them frequently in his early sermons, strikingly in that on the "Individuality of the Soul," more strikingly in another on the "Greatness and Littleness of Human Life," and

most strikingly in one called "The Lapse of Time," from which the following paragraph is taken:

"But let us follow the course of a soul thus casting off the world, and cast off by it. It goes forth as a stranger on a journey. Man seems to die and to be no more, when he is but quitting us, and is really beginning to live. Then he sees sights which before it did not even enter into his mind to conceive, and the world is even less to him than he to the world. Just now he was lying on the bed of sickness, but in that moment of death what an awful change has come over him! What a crisis for him! There is stillness in the room that lately held him; nothing is doing there, for he is gone; he now belongs to others; he now belongs entirely to the Lord who bought him; to Him he returns; but whether to be lodged safely in His place of hope, or to be imprisoned against the great Day, that is another matter, that depends on the deeds done in the body, whether good or evil. And now what are his thoughts? How infinitely important now appears the value of time, when it is nothing to him! Nothing; for though he spend centuries waiting for Christ, he cannot now alter his state from bad to good, or from good to bad. What he dieth, that he must be for ever; as the tree falleth so must it lie.”

The most striking use to which Newman turned his thoughts on the "rending of the veil" before the writing of Gerontius occurred in his sermon on the "Neglect of Divine Calls and Warnings" published in 1849. Demas dies after a life of invincible but unjustified moral complacency and at his death "has committed sacrilege for the last time." . . . He is borne to judgment and is condemned. Then follows a kind of dramatic monologue-Newman tried this again with deadly effect in his attack on Achilli-in which Demas cries out upon the fiends who throng around him: "It is not I of whom