“So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.”
There has been some controversy as to the author’s meaning in the last two lines. Nearly a half century after they were written some one asked the Cardinal to give an explanation, and in a letter dated January 18, 1879, he thus wisely replied:
“You flatter me by your question; but I think it was Keble who, when asked it in his own case, answered that poets were not bound to be critics, or to give a sense to what they had written; and though I am not, like him, a poet, at least I may plead that I am not bound to remember my own meaning, whatever it was, at the end of almost fifty years. Anyhow, there must be a statute of limitation for writers of verse, or it would be quite tyranny if, in an art which is the expression, not of truth, but of imagination and sentiment, one were obliged to be ready for examination on the transient state of mind which came upon one when homesick, or seasick, or in any other way sensitive or excited.”
Cardinal Newman died August 11, 1890, fifty-seven years after his hymn had made his name immortal.