Ah, what an echo, Antony, every word of this beautiful passage finds in my own heart, only saddened with the poignant regret that the necessary business and occupation of the passing years have dulled for me such unpolished facility, as I may once have possessed, for perusing my Homer and my Horace!
It is, indeed, rare in these days to find gentlemen as familiar as were their forebears with Latin and Greek. You, Antony, will probably find yourself as you grow up in like case with myself, but there will remain for your unending instruction and delight all the glories of English literature, to give you a taste for which these few letters of mine are written, plucking only a single flower here and there from the most wonderful garden in the world.
Your loving old
G.P.
25
My Dear Antony,
Cardinal Newman, of whom I shall write to-day, was the first of the great writers born in the nineteenth century, and he lived from 1801 to 1890. Besides being a master of English prose he was no mean poet; but above all else he was a man of immense personal power, which was strangely associated with a manifest saintliness which compelled diffidence from those admitted to his intimacy.
I have described him as I knew him in my Memories;[[1]] and now will quote to you his utterance on music and its effect upon the heart of man, which has always seemed to me too precious to leave buried in a sermon:—
"Let us take an instance, of an outward and earthly form, or economy, under which great wonders unknown seem to be typified; I mean musical sounds as they are exhibited most perfectly in instrumental harmony.