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From Blackwood's Magazine.
NEWMAN'S POEMS.*

of his Sonnets. There the curtain is lifted; there the heart, which seemed to throb with no other pulse than the current of universal humanity, discloses to us its own bitterness. And we mark, with no common emotion, how the eagle eye, which scanned untroubled (as we thought) the heights and depths of man's being, can grow dim with tears. We listen, and awe overcomes us as we hear the voice, which stirred all hearts with its trumpet's call, faltering forth the sadlychanged accents,—

THERE are two especial causes of the interest excited in us by the labours of a great mind in a sphere different to the one in which it is accustomed to work. In the first place, such úpɛpya are valuable for their own sake. Even where left confessed y imperfect, a sketch by the hand of genius teaches us more than the most elaborate performance which exhibits no higher quality than skill. The Sonnets of Michael Angelo, for instance, were the recreations of a man whose serious business it was to paint a Sistine Chapel, or to sculpture Medicean sepNow, it is to the class of works which we ulchres. But the verse of the one leisure have described bour breathes the same serious and noble in its horæ subsecivæ "that the small the occupation of genius spirit that animates the form over which the volume before us belongs. The greater Titanic workman laboured. It is stamped portion of it has appeared before in the more carelessly, perhaps, than they are; but with the same ineffaceable impress of grandeur.

And there is a second reason why we like to read a sculptor's sonnets, a statesman's romance, a philosopher's poetic fancies, or the fugitive pieces of a dramatist; and it is one quite independent of their intrinsic merits. It is this: Through them we find admission into that charmed cirele -a great man's inmost mind. We appear to share with his intimate friends his hours of relaxation, while we read the thoughts which made those hours pass swiftly. Nay, at times we seem, through our survey of these confidential moments, to see further into his inmost soul than the very friends perhaps could do who joined in his diversion from business.

Is not this especially the case in our study of the greatest of all poets? That unegotistic genius which is the peculiar splendour of Shakespeare, veils his own personality in its excess of light; and renders him unapproachable in proportion as it renders him admirable. The wondrous mirror of the Shakespearean drama, which reflects so impartially every type of character, gives us no glimpse of the mighty master's features as he stands behind it; and we are forced to abandon every hope of penetrating Shakespeare's inner life through his plays. But not so when we turn to some

Verses on Various Occasions. By J. H. New.

man. London: Burns & Oates. 1868.

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"Wearied with these, for restful death I sigh."

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forth, with some significant omissions, and Lyra Apostolica"; but it now time with the writer's name. one most important addition, for the first dates show us how many of the most beauThe appended tiful poems which it contains we owe to the enforced leisure of travel; and a glance at the contents of any theological library will tell how small a part of Dr. Newman's time can have been bestowed on poetic studies. It is, then, on both the grounds which have been already mentioned that his on Various Occasions" claim to arrest our Verses attention; and they have yet a third, more peculiarly their own. For while they are the work of a powerful intellect, unbent for a season from sterner tasks; and while they offer us glimpses of a mind which friend and foe have often scanned with a perplexed curiosity; they also, in the third place, present themselves as contributions to contemporary ecclesiastical history: as witnesses in the great cause which the nineteenth century is being forced to try over again-the justice and necessity of the religious Reformation of the sixteenth. The book which contains them will therefore certainly be read and pondered by many who do not belong to that small company the disinterested lovers of poetry. It has attractions for all who know, even only by hearsay, how great was its writer's share in that movement which is still largely affecting, both for good and for evil, the spiritual life of our day. While his old hearers at

Oxford - the men who (whether at the at once the presence of these three indistime the preacher's peculiar doctrines pensable requisites in the poet. We shall pleased or displeased them) confess now find these verses marked by an antique sinthat, after a quarter of a century's lapse, gleness of thought and simplicity of diction ; his voice yet echoes in their hearts* we shall see in them (for the most part) a must needs open this book with no common due preference for the concrete to the abfeelings. They must find pleasure, though stract; nor, though their themes exclude perhaps sorrowful pleasure, in reviving, by the ordinary sources of passion in poetry, its aid, their remembrance of their former and though their writer's severe self-restraint teacher. They will see in the hidden life may look cold to a superficial glance, shall here unveiled to them the source of that we find them otherwise than the expression strong influence which they acknowledge; of genuine and strong feeling. The lamp they will here seek to trace out that path which burns in this alabaster shrine is no which he trod alone, even while his outward painted fire; only it was not kindled at any road ran as yet parallel with theirs. Most earthly hearth. of all will they come prepared to look sadly on the scars which may bear witness to that great conflict in which they lost their leader; and to ask what have been the results of loss and gain" to this gifted being, from the act of spiritual suicide by which ties still dear to memory were so violently rent asunder..

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We do not ourselves profess to be insensible to such considerations. Our first concern, however, is with Dr. Newman as a poet; our first inquiry, how far the "subtile and fine science of logic," as Milton styles it, has yielded up her place in these pages to her " more simple, sensuous, and passionate" sister, poetry? And a few extracts from the earlier poems may enable us to discern

*We quote the eloquent words of an unimpeachable witness:-" His [Newman's] power showed itself chiefly in the new and unlooked-for way in which he touched into life old truths, moral or spiritual, which all Christians acknowledge, but most have ceased to feel. As he spoke, how the old

truth became new! How it came home with a

meaning never felt before! He laid his finger

how gently, yet how powerfully! - on some inner place in the hearer's heart, and told him things about himself he had never known till then.

For instance, with what unfeigned and fervent indignation the poem entitled “Progress of Unbelief" glows! What other poets have sung under the influence of strong personal feeling of their own wrongs is said here at the sight of the Faith dishonoured by an unbelieving generation :— "Now is the autumn of the Tree of Life;

Its leaves are shed upon the unthankful earth,

Which lets them whirl, a prey to the winds' strife,

Heartless to store them for the month of dearth.

Men close the door, and dress the cheerful
hearth,

Self-trusting still; and in his comely gear
Of precept and of rite a household Baal rear.
But I will out amid the sleet, and view

Each shrivelling stalk and silent-falling leaf.
Truth after truth, of choicest scent and hue,
Fades, and, in fading, stirs the angels' grief,
Unanswered here; for she, once pattern chief
Of faith, my Country, now gross-hearted grown,
Waits but to burn the stem before her idol's
throne."

To call these sermons eloquent would not be the An unjust picture, doubtless; as much too word for them-high poems they rather were, as favourable to the past as too harsh a porof an inspired singer; or the outpouring as of a traiture of the present; though scarcely prophet, rapt, yet self-possessed. And the tone of voice in which they were spoken, once you grew ac- justifying Dr. Arnold's charge against its customed to it, sounded like a fine strain of un-painter of "hating the nineteenth century earthly music. Through the stillness of that high for its own sake;" but an example of the Gothic building [St. Mary's] the words fell on the ear like the measured drippings of water in some vast dim cave. After hearing these sermons you might come away still not believing the tenets peculiar to the High Church system; but you would be harder than most men if you did not feel more than ever ashamed of coarseness, selfishness, worldliness; if you did not feel the things of faith brought

closer to the soul."- Shairp's Studies in Poetry and Philosophy.

simplicity of strong feeling, when, in the overwhelming sense of injury to what is dearer than life, all considerations but one vanish, and the mind has room for nothing but its grief. Now, contrast with this poem of indignation a poem of deep and quiet feeling, most simple in its tenderness as the

an answer supplied | poem called "Flowers without Fruit," may

former in its wrath
beforehand to the longing cry
"Oh, Christ, that it were possible

After long years to see

The souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be !"

It is entitled "A Voice from Afar: "

66 Weep not for me: —

Be blithe as wont, nor tinge with gloom
The stream of love that circles home,

Light hearts and free!

Joy in the gifts Heaven's bounty lends;
Nor miss my face, dear friends!

"I still am near,

Watching the smiles I prized on earth,
Your converse mild, your blameless mirth;
Now too I hear

Of whispered sounds the tale complete,
Low prayers and musings sweet.

"A sea before

The Throne is spread - its pure still glass
Pictures all earth-scenes as they pass.

We, on the shore,
Share, in the bosom of our rest,

God's knowledge, and are blest."

There is a tranquil beauty in this little poem, like the shining of moonlight in some woodland glade. Its depths of feeling are still and unruffled; but they are more profound than many more ambitious waters.

serve as examples. The first is a sermon compressed into the limit of a short epigram; but the verse only gives it force and polish, it is not the necessary expression of an essentially poetic thought. The second, since we have read in Newman's "Apologia" of his early friendship with Archbishop Whately, we shall always regard as its memorial; expressing as it does a favourite thought of that logical but unimaginative mind, in a manner which must have met with its entire approval. But for the most part it is otherwise with these poems. Their writer, if he sometimes presents the truths by which his soul has been stirred, too much as bare abstractions, yet oftener sees and presents them to us as real existences which reveal themselves under graceful and symbolic forms. Nowfit is some well-known event in sacred or in classic story, now it is some occurrence of daily life or some incident of travel, which furnishes a local habitation for the winged thought that flitted round the lonely student. He does not much seek for metaphors; they, unsought, seek him; for to him the invisible world is the real world, and the visible only precious as its exponent.

In the picture-gallery which we have just entered, warmth and colour do not predomiWhen, turning once again to Milton's nate; its noblest characteristic is rather celebrated definition, we find that it is essen- that fine severity of perfect light, which is tial to poetry to be not only "simple and so admirable in Ary Scheffer's best picpassionate," but "sensuous," we naturally tures. And if the roseate hue of youth and reflect for a moment on the exact sense of health is lacking in the saints and martyrs the expression. And we find it to import that on its walls—if their robe of flesh has poetry should no more consist of soul with- grown too thin and transparent for one out body than of body without soul. There kind of beauty- yet, for that very reason, must be the fire of passion to vivify; but an hour spent in their company may prove a there must likewise be the material frame at welcome change to eyes wearied by seeing hand to receive the gift of life. Poetry may the spirit overpowered by the flesh, in more presuppose and ground herself on the deep-than one gallery of our present poets. The est philosophy; she should rarely discourse resemblance of Newman's poetry to Dante's it. She may have metaphysics for her in its high spiritualism, may have attracted allies; she must not suffer them to be her rulers. Now, when we apply this definition to the book before us, we find it to condemn some of the poems which it contains. For there are several of them in which the poet is lost in the preacher, and of which instruction is plainly rather the object than delight. Of this class the three brief stanzas entitled "St. Paul at Melita," and the little

notice the sooner on account of the outward traits of likeness between the two men ; each blinded to the good of his own times by a too keen and scornful perception of their evil; each severed from community of purpose with his countrymen, yet yearning to regain their sympathy; each, moreover, making war for an idea, sacrificing cherished local immunities to the phantom

As I speed upwards, I shall on me bear,
And in no breathless whirl, the things that

were,

And duties given, and ends I did obey.
And when at length I reach the Throne of Power,
Ah! still unscared I shall in fulness see
The vision of my past innumerous deeds,
My deep heart-courses, and their motive seeds,
So to gaze on till the red-dooming hour.
Lord, in that strait, the Judge! remember me! "

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of a venerable central authority, and fearlessly incurring the reproach of treason for that dear object's sake. Still, in his readiness to decorate the tabernacle with the spoils of Egypt, in his mastery over his own language, in a vivid realism which depicts scenes remote from human experience as might an eyewitness, above all, in his habit of taking the invisible for the basis of his operations on the visible, instead of, The strict laws of the sonnet suit Dr. like other men, approaching the unseen by the seen, Dr. Newman is a kindred spirit Newman's genius better than do bold PinTragic Choof that great poet's, to whom, in wide range daric flights. Of his two of power and magnitude of grasp, it wouldruses," the best, "Judaism," has the debe an idle task to compare him. We shall fect of consisting merely of strophe and two presently see how his latest poem, "The antistrophes i.e., of three precisely simThe first of the three is, Dream of Gerontius," suggests several in-ilar stanzas. teresting points of contact between them. however, very fine. It makes a worthy use Meantime, there is already something Dan- of the grand form of the Edipus Coloneus, tesque in his early sonnet on Concyra, that as the symbol of God's rejected people in classic type of revolutions. Notice how their woeful dignity; bearing, yet bringing, speedily the antiquary's, the historian's in- a curse; everywhere, yet nowhere at home; terest, is swallowed up in solemn reflection with their sad present, but mysterious hope on the continued existence of each long-for the future: vanished actor in those once stirring

scenes:

I sat beneath an olive's branches grey,
And gazed upon the site of a lost town,
By sage and poet raised to long renown;
Where dwelt a race that on the sea held sway,
And, restless as its waters, forced a way
For civil strife a thousand states to drown.
That multitudinous stream we now note down
As though one life, in birth and in decay.
But is their being's history spent and run,
Whose spirits live in awful singleness,
Each in its self-formed sphere of light or gloom;
Henceforth, while pondering the fierce deeds then

done,

Such reverence on me shall its seal impress
As though I corpses saw, and walked the tomb."

Here it is the past which summons up the ghostly present. In the next sonnet we shall quote (faithful like the first in structure to the pattern of Petrarch and of Milton), it is the present which is the prophet of the future; the power of memory, felt while journeying, is the pledge of its might in days to come; when the traveller shall have at last gone the way whence he may not return. In both, the light which plays on the picture is a gleam from the world of spirits; the dead yet live, the living is hastening on to join their ranks.

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"O piteous race!

Fearful to look upon,
Once standing in high place,
Heaven's eldest son.
O aged blind

Unvenerable! as thou flittest by,
I liken thee to him in Pagan song,

In thy gaunt majesty,

The vagrant king, of haughty-purposed mind,
Whom prayer nor plague could bend;
Wronged, at the cost of him who did the wrong,
Accursed himself, but in his cursing strong,
And honoured in his end."

Whenever we think of either of those two pre-eminent tragedies which have Edipus for their hero, these last five lines recur to our mind as the best possible summary of the strange contrasts in which the "Sophoclean irony" delights: the king of all men the most wretched while he seems the happiest, most full of might when lowest in estate. There is another fine lyric in this collection called "Reverses," which blends with good effect, in its first symbols taken from history; summing up two stanzas, the images of nature with the particular exemplifications of the decay of splendour at its height, familiar to the student of sacred and profane story, by an appeal to the universal type with which all men are acquainted:

"When mirth is full and free,
Some sudden gloom shall be;
When haughty power mounts high,
The Watcher's axe is nigh,

All growth has bound, when greatest found,
It hastes to die.

When the rich town, that long
Has lain its huts among,
Uprears its pageants vast,
And vaunts-it shall not last!
Bright tints that shine, are but a sign
Of summer past.

And when thine eye surveys,
With fond adoring gaze,

And yearning heart, thy friend –
Love to its grave doth tend.

All gifts below, save Truth, but grow
Towards an end."

This climax is very touching. It sets before us friendship as at once the most precious and the most fragile of earthly goods; as affecting a noble heart by its evanescence far more than "temple and tower" in their overthrow can do; because when it dies a spiritual thing perishes, which had a right to immortality. Indeed the view of friendship given us in these poems is a very mournful one. To their writer's mind the happiest friends are those severed in good time by the hand of death, so as to escape worse partings. The lifelong sorrow which throbs and pulses on the many-chorded lyre of In Memoriam," is to his mind an enviable thing, since it is unmixed by any bitterness or self-reproach. It is in this spirit that he approaches the most famous friendship on record.

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So dear in memory;

Paul, of his comrade reft, the warning gives,
He lives to us who dies, he is but lost who lives."

Who can deem this last stanza otherwise than most unjust to the love of David for Jonathan? And as to the second, would it be too hazardous to conjecture that, whatever good dreams, haunted like those of Achilles by Patroclus, may have brought the Hebrew monarch, he would have derived far more from his living friend? nay, that even from the most grievous sin of his

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Isaac's pure blessings and a verdant home,

Didst spare me, and withhold Thy fearful
word;

Wiling me, year by year, till I am found,
A pilgrim pale, with Paul's sad girdle bound."

It would be hard to find a fault in these two stanzas; except the excessive alliteration (or rather awkward proximity of two similar sounds, pale and Paul), in its last line. Otherwise they are very perfect in themselves, and inexpressibly touching by their tone of resigned sorrow. We have often wished to ask their author whether the resemblance in sentiment between the first of them and one of the most pathetic passages in Shakespeare is a designed or undesigned coincidence. We have ourselves always supposed it to be the latter; well knowing how much more familiarly the banks of the distant Ilissus are haunted by Oxford men, than those of the nearer Avon. In that case its date of near forty years ago is worth noticing; as showing how a blameless divine could pluck, ere the mezzo cammin was passed, the same bitter fruit of knowledge which our great dramatist represents as the result of a whole life of care and crime.

In the close of this poem, as in so many of Newman's, a scene familiar to Bible

"O heaven! that one might read the book of fate;
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent
Weary of solid firmness) melt away
Into the sea! and, other times, to see
The beachy girdle of the ocean

Too wide for Neptune's hips: how chances mock,
And changes till the cup of alteration.
With divers liquors! O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth, viewing his progress
through,

What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the door, and sit him down and
die."

- King Henry IV., Act iii., Scene 1.

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