amid unquiet fire; his face was flaccid, wasted, unsound; hoary as with extreme age: he was trembling on the brink of the grave. Adieu, thou first Friend; adieu, while this confused twilight of existence lasts! Might we meet where Twilight has become Day!"

CHAPTER XV.

PROSE POETS: CARDINAL NEWMAN.

DURING the first fifty years of this century, there were living in England three men, three teachers of men, each of whom appealed to what is highest in man, to the moral and spiritual side of human nature, and by that appeal told most powerfully on his generation. These men were William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, and John Henry Newman. Each gathered round himself in time, whether consciously or not, a group of disciples, whom he influenced, and who became conductors of his influence to the minds of his countrymen. All three were idealists, believers in the mental and spiritual forces, as higher than the material, and as ruling them but idealists each after his own fashion. The strength of each lay in a large measure in his imagination, and in the power with which he stirred his fellowmen, by bearing home to their imaginations his own views of truth. But here any likeness between them begins and ends.

No three men of power, living in the same epoch, lived more aloof from each other, borrowed less from each other, were more independent of each other's influence, were less appreciative of each other's gift.

What Carlyle thought of Wordsworth we know too well, from the brief notice in the Reminiscences, in which Carlyle speaks out his "intelligent contempt" for the great poeta contempt which does not prove his own

superiority. And Wordsworth, if he did not return the contempt, was, we have reason to believe, in no way an admirer of Carlyle, or of any of his works; and, when they met, turned but a cold side towards him.

There is no reason to think that Carlyle and Cardinal Newman knew much or anything of each other's works; certainly they never met. For High Church doctrine Carlyle expresses nothing but scorn, whenever he alludes to it, and cannot preserve either equanimity or good manners in presence of anything that looked like sacerdotalism.

Had they ever met, we can well imagine the refined Cardinal Newman turning toward the rough Scot that reticence and reserve which none knew better how to maintain, in presence of the uncongenial. Then, as to Wordsworth and Cardinal Newman, while the old poet knew and appreciated The Christian Year, and used to comment on it, there is nowhere any evidence that Cardinal Newman's works had ever reached, or any way affected him. And as for the younger of these two, it was only this time last year that he told one in Oxford, that he was quite innocent of any familiarity with Wordsworth. "No! I was never soaked in Wordsworth, as some of my contemporaries were."

Strange, is it not? that three such teachers, who have each at different times influenced so powerfully men younger than themselves, should have lived so apart, as little appreciating each other, as if they had been inhabitants of different countries, or even of different planets.

Of these three teachers, the two elder are no longer here. The third still remains among us, in beautiful and revered old age. It is of him that I have now to speak.

We saw how that which lay at the centre of Carlyle's great literary power was the force of a vigorous personality, a unique character, an indomitable will. Not less marked and strong is the personality of Cardinal Newman, but the two personalities passed through very different experiences. In the one the rough ore was presented to the world, just as it had come direct from mother earth, with all the clay and mud about it. The other underwent in youth the most searching processes, intellectual and social; met, in rivalry or in friendship, many men of the highest order, his own equals, and came forth from the ordeal seven times refined. But this training no way impaired his native strength or damped his ardor. Only it taught him to know what is due to the feelings and convictions of others, as well as what became his own self-respect. He did not consider it any part of veracity to speak out, at all hazards, every impulse and prejudice, every like and dislike which he felt. That a thing is true was, in his view,

no reason why it should be said, but why it should be done, acted on, made our own inwardly." And as the firm fibre of his nature remained the same, all the training and refining it went through made it only more sure in aim, and more effective in operation. The difference of the two men is that between the furious strength of Roderick Dhu, and the trained power and graceful skill of James Fitz-James.

There are many sides from which the literary work of Cardinal Newman might be viewed; but there is only one aspect in which, speaking in this place, it would be pertinent to regard it. To dwell on his work as a theologian, or as a controversialist, or even as he is a preacher or a religious teacher, would be unbecoming

here. It is mainly as he is a poet that I feel warranted to advert to his writings now.

When I speak of him as one of the great prose poets of our time, this is not because, as in the case of Carlyle, he had not the gift of expressing himself in verse, or did not at times practise it. That he could do so effectively, readers of the Lyra Apostolica do not need to be informed. They remember his few impressive lines on The Call of David, rendering in a brief page of verse the whole outline of that wonderful life; his lines too on David and Jonathan, and those on The Greek Fathers, and those entitled Separation, upon a friend lately lost.

Here are some lines entitled Rest of Saints Departed:

"They are at rest:

We may not stir the heaven of their repose
By rude invoking voice, or prayer addrest
In waywardness, to those

Who in the mountain grots of Eden lie,
And hear the fourfold river as it murmurs by.

"They hear it sweep

In distance down the dark and savage vale;
But they at rocky bed, or current deep,

Shall never more grow pale;

They hear, and meekly muse, as fain to know,

How long untired, unspent, that giant stream shall flow."

Or the next poem of the book, called Knowledge, which means the knowledge which saints departed have of what goes on on earth:

"A sea before

The Throne is spread; its pure, still glass
Pictures all earth-scenes as they pass.

We, on its shore,

Share, in the bosom of our rest,

God's knowledge, and are blest."