And all will soon be plain.”
‘Such was Newman’s feeling for the friend (already suffering from the commencement of the consumption of which he died three years later) with whom he visited the Mediterranean between December, 1832, and April, 1833, when they separated at Rome…. They visited Ithaca, but in his poems written “off Ithaca” Newman never mentions the name of Ulysses, though in passing Lisbon he had recalled that strong pagan figure, in the lines which he headed “The Isles of the Sirens”:
‘“Cease, stranger, cease those piercing notes,
The craft of siren choirs;
Hush the seductive voice that floats
Upon the languid wires.
Music’s ethereal fire was given
Not to dissolve our clay,
But draw Promethean beams from heaven,