[Footnote 71]
[Footnote 71: Iliad, [Sigma] 125. Apologia, p. 98.]
The scars of warfare are visible even in Newman's hymns. He has evidently passed through many an inward conflict, and fought with, many an external foe. He has vacated ground he once occupied, and he defends principles which he once assailed. He pierces many heights, and depths, and has to be always on his guard against his lively imagination. He is lucid as any star, but not always as serene. He flashes now and then like a meteor; he hints and suggests in nebulous light. He is a pioneer of thought; he shoots beyond his comrades; he walks "with Death and Morning on the Silver Horns." He sees, where others grope; he is at home, where others feel confused and out of place. He is, like Ballanche, [Footnote 72] more satisfied of the truth of the unseen than of the visible world. Mysteries are his solemn pastime. He strikes his harp in Limbo, as Spaniards weave a dance in church before the Holy Sacrament. His dreams are Dantesque; he is half a seer. The veil of death is rent before him, and his soul, by anticipation, launches into the abyss. The chains of the body are dropped, and angels and demons come round him to console and to harass his solitary spirit in its transition state. His condition there, like his poetry, and like himself on earth and in the body, is one of mingled quietude and disturbance;
"And the deep rest, so soothing and so sweet,
Had something, too, of sternness and of pain."
[Footnote 73]
[Footnote 72: Dublin Review, July, 1865, p. 10. "Madame Récamier.">[
[Footnote 73: "Dream of Gerontius," § 2.]
The happy, suffering soul ("for it is safe, consumed, yet quickened, by the glance of God,") sings in Purgatory in a strain identical with that to which it was used in this mortal life:
"Take me away, and in the lowest deep
There let me be,
And there in hope the lone night-watches keep,
Told out for me.
There motionless and happy in my pain,
Lone, not forlorn—
There will I sing my sad perpetual strain
Until the morn;
There will I sing and soothe my stricken breast,
Which ne'er can cease
To throb and pine and languish, till possest
Of its sole peace." [Footnote 74]
[Footnote 74: Ibid. § 6.]
There is, indeed, one of Dr. Newman's poems, and that one the most popular and beautiful he has ever composed, which is singularly pathetic and peaceful. Yet even here darker shades are not wanting. The angel faces are "lost awhile," and the "pride" and self-will of former years recur to the memory like spectres. It was in June, 1833, when becalmed in the Straits of Bonifacio in an orange-boat [Footnote 75] that Dr. Newman wrote "Lead, Kindly Light." The Pall Mall Gazette—no mean critic—has said of it recently, [Footnote 76] "It appears to us one of the most perfect poems of the kind in the language."
[Footnote 75: Apologia, p. 99.]
[Footnote 76: Jan. 23, 1868]