LECTURE III. DR. NEWMAN'S 'DREAM OF GERONTIUS. A POET is not always interesting to his readers exactly in proportion to his artistic eminence. The distinction drawn by Wordsworth at the opening of the 'Excursion,' between what he calls the vision and the faculty divine' and what he calls the accomplishment of verse, does not apply itself only, as he applies it there, to those who write and to those who refrain altogether from writing. It enters also into our comparative estimate of certain different classes among literary men. With regard to some, we should say, that what they give to the world is, more emphatically, an exhibition of talent, of intellectual brilliancy, of pure literary power; whilst, as to others again, we cannot but feel that their efforts come upon us as suggesting something more, as outpourings from unsounded depths within the character, as irrepressible utterances of the hidden soul. Now, in the earlier stages of society, the true and born poet was not looked upon, I apprehend, as a literary man at all; he belonged to a race apart (åvev μανίας οὐδεὶς ποιήτης), and was ranked accordingly among prophets rather than among authors; he was a favoured servant upon whom a precious burden was laid; a chosen interpreter, to whom noble messages were entrusted— messages which he was driven, under the pressure of a self-consuming enthusiasm, to communicate in music to man. But as civilisation rolled down from those august heights and clouded solitudes, where, according to the common belief of nations, her original fountainhead derived itself from God; as she flowed into a thousand circulating channels, and fertilised new ground, the arts of life gradually assumed a more practical and definite form. When this took place, the poet was, in a great degree, unmantled and discrowned-perhaps at present I ought rather to say, was disestablished and disendowed;-he had, whatever the proper phrase may be, to retire into the background. Sophists, rhetoricians, orators, and statesmen all thought that they could teach the people how to live and what to wish for, much better than solemn old gentlemen who kept crooning their mystic hexameters, in harmony with the motions of a staff. Philosophers, in their turn, maintained that the right to bore mankind with discussions about rò èv and the pure reason, was indisputably theirs; whilst historians made it clear that the necessary twist could be given to facts more succinctly and more plausibly in prose than in verse. Poetry, therefore, though it still continued to live and to please, ceased to be that exhausting burthen, that painful wrestling with the powers of the universe, by which its earlier votaries were at once ennobled and overwhelmed. Still, however, some rays from the retiring sun-god were refracted around the image of the bard; and, even to this day, there lingers a belief, true or false, that when a poet, real, original, and unmistakeable, rises upon us, his genius, his inspiration, as we call it, is something special, something differing not in degree but in kind from any inspiration which urges on the orator, the statesman, or the mathematician. When, therefore, we turn to our present imaginative writers, who come forward as artists and creators to enchant us with the graces and varieties of a beautiful literature, a half thought crosses the mind now and then whether the harp which they have inherited retains all her original strings; whether the chord of mystery which at first gave a tone of strange power and earnestness to the whole instrument, has not somehow or other relaxed itself, and silently mouldered away. If, then, at such moments we find in our path some lonely and single-minded searcher after wisdom, 'Whose soul is like a star, and dwells apart,'— if we find one for whom life is no arena upon which brilliant accomplishments may be displayed, or glittering crowns of victory arrived at-no place for easy pleasure, or even the most innocent self-indulgence, we are surprised and startled into reverence. We, perhaps, may be wasting our time in frivolous pleasures or unsubstantial pursuits; but, to him, his life has ever proved a problem which all the years of it are too short to solve-an arid desert massed up with mirages and phantoms, through which he has to struggle, in order that he may bring himself face to face with his own ideal of the truth. Such a man-and I call Dr. Newman such a man-if he writes verses, writes them because he cannot help himself; the travail of his heart must come out somehow, or else it will tear him to pieces; and in his restlessness he discovers that verse, for him, is the natural outlet of feeling. From his thoughts any idea of mere literary The subjects success is a thousand leagues away. which he chooses are not those most susceptible of poetical embellishments. No; they are his own doubts and struggles, the glimpses of light and the oppressions of darkness which alternately cheer and sadden his unparticipated existence. To put it better than I can, he grapples, not as an imaginative exercise, but in deadly earnest with • Those obstinate questionings Of sense, and outward things, Moving about in worlds not realised: High instincts, before which our mortal nature Doth tremble, like a guilty thing surprised.' From such a man we may be as far removed in spirit and in feeling as if he were an inhabitant of the Dog-star; but still we find ourselves, whenever we meet him, in the presence of something unquestionably noble. Moreover, if we regard him as a poet, though others may delight us more, though his intellectual gifts for that particular purpose may be comparatively unimportant, still the fibre of intensity is always alive within him; and over him the sense of intercommunion with something higher and deeper than man 'Broods like the day, a master o'er a slave- |