Of triumph and remorse, of hope and fear.
NEW SELF.
Mourn’st thou, poor soul? and wouldst thou yet
Call back the things which shall not, can not be?
Heaven must be won, not dreamed; thy task is set:
Peace was not made for earth, nor rest for thee.’
Four other sacred poems which Hurrell wrote in 1833 may as well be given here. He and Newman burst into song together, though he with far more remote and infrequent music. Probably no lyrist ever had such a poor opinion of himself. But in the qualities of clearness, simplicity, orderly thought and noble severity, there is something very remarkable in Hurrell’s few brief scattered verses. They have a strong singleness and sad transparency, the tone of them a little chilly, yet almost Virgilian, and arrestingly beautiful; they, like himself, are impersonal, and full of character; abstinent, concentrated, true. The unexpected grace is their cunning harmony, and the trick of that is neither derived nor deliberately invented. His every line instinctively sings and flies. He has nothing to match a certain refrain of Newman’s, in what he calls his ‘ecclesiastical carol,’—
‘For scantness is still Heaven’s might.’
It is a good instance of an always interesting literary anomaly that such a line, in its raucous sibilation, should have been produced by an accomplished musician, whereas unfailing melody belongs to Froude, who, loving naturally what he once called ‘the bright and silent pleasures of poetry,’ had small sense of music as an independent art. Yet Newman certainly was capable of a sustained grandeur, as in his verses on Greek models, which Froude did not attempt, and could not attain.
‘Tyre.