Is pledged to thee in love, as to thy foes in power.’
Even the text from S. John, which Hurrell had suggested as colophon, stands under his separate β after Keble’s poem, in every edition, as if by some solemn little rubrical observance. Both Keble and Newman were most careful, in all these delicate ways, to preserve their friend’s least touch upon the early printed work of the Movement. It was his death which led to the revelation of the authorship of all the poems in Lyra Apostolica. They would else have remained strictly anonymous. ‘One of the writers in whom the work originated,’ says Newman in his very brief preface, dated at Oxford on All Saints’ Day of 1836, ‘having been taken from his friends … it seemed desirable … to record what belonged to him, while it was possible to do so; and this has led to a general discrimination of the poems, by signatures at the end of each.’
Two days after ‘Trembling Hope,’ on June 28, Hurrell sends to his old Tutor the most beautiful, and also the most characteristic of his verses.
‘Daniel.
εἰσὶν εὐνοῦχοι, οἵτινεσ εὐνούχισαν ἑαυτοὺς διὰ τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν.
—S. Matt. xix. 12.[136]
‘Son of sorrow, doomed by fate
To a lot most desolate,
To joyless youth and childless age;
Last of thy father’s lineage;
Blighted being! whence hast thou