One who could love them, but who durst not love:
A vow had bound him ne’er to give his heart
To streamlet bright, or soft secluded grove.
’Twas a hard humbling task, onward to move
His easy-captured eye from each fair spot,
With unattached and lonely step to rove
O’er happy meads which soon its print forgot.
Yet kept he safe his pledge, prizing his pilgrim lot.’[74]
There was a lifelong strife in Newman’s mind between created and Uncreated Beauty, or rather, a lifelong choice. He seems to have felt that he could not be as much of a poet as his own heart prompted, and be also as much of a hard-working saint as Divine Grace called him to be. For him, as in the beginning, a loved landscape was ‘pagan’: a temptation towards false gods. How little his attitude was understood, during his life, is well illustrated by the published complaint of Mr. Aubrey de Vere that his friend Dr. Newman of the Catholic University would never make time to go driving with him through the exquisite scenery about Dublin, though invited again and again. In all this, as in much else, he was entirely Augustinian. Ejiciebas eas et intrabas pro eis. It does not seem clear that Hurrell Froude, who outran Newman in many austerities, shared fully in the exercise of this signal one. His loneliness of spirit, far more developed than his friend’s, was also far less conscious, and his boyish relish of the beauties of moor and sea based itself, rather, on a
philosophy which was Keble’s, and Henry Vaughan’s long before him: