THE HYMNS OF DR. FABER.

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of what he tells us, and by nothing else, are they blessed. What if their theories show to me like a burning of the temple and a looking for the god in the ashes? They know in whom they have believed. And if some of us think we have a more excellent way, we shall be blessed indeed if the result be no less excellent than in such men as Faber, Newman, and Aubrey de Vere. No man needs be afraid that to speak the truth concerning such will hasten the dominance of alien and oppressive powers; the truth is free, and to be just is to be strong. Should the time come again when Liberty is in danger, those who have defended the truth even in her adversaries, if such there be, will be found the readiest to draw the sword for her, and, hating not, yet smite for the liberty to do even them justice. To give the justice we claim for ourselves is, if there be a Christ, the law of Christ, to obey which is eternally better than truest theory.

I should like to give many of the hymns of Dr. Faber. Some of them are grand, others very lovely, and some, of course, to my mind considerably repulsive. He seems to me to go wrong nowhere in originating-he produces nothing unworthy except when he reproduces what he never could have entertained but for the pressure of acknowledged authority. Even such things, however, he has enclosed in pearls, as the oyster its incommoding sand-grains.

His hymn on The Greatness of God is profound; that on The Will of God is very wise; that to The God of my Childhood is full of quite womanly tender

ness all are most simple in speech, reminding us in this respect of John Mason. In him, no doubt, as in all of his class, we find traces of that sentimentalism in the use of epithets-small words, as distinguished from homely, applied to great things-of which I have spoken more than once; but criticism is not to be indulged in the reception of great gifts-of such a gift as this, for instance :

THE ETERNITY OF GOD.

O Lord! my heart is sick,
Sick of this everlasting change;
And life runs tediously quick

Through its unresting race and varied range:
Change finds no likeness to itself in Thee,
And wakes no echo in Thy mute eternity.

Dear Lord! my heart is sick
Of this perpetual lapsing time,

So slow in grief, in joy so quick,

Yet ever casting shadows so sublime:
Time of all creatures is least like to Thee,
And yet it is our share of Thine eternity.

Oh change and time are storms
For lives so thin and frail as ours;

For change the work of grace deforms
With love that soils, and help that overpowers;
And time is strong, and, like some chafing sea,
It seems to fret the shores of Thine eternity.

Weak, weak, for ever weak!
We cannot hold what we possess;

Youth cannot find, age will not seek,—
Oh weakness is the heart's worst weariness:
But weakest hearts can lift their thoughts to Thee;
It makes us strong to think of Thine eternity.

THE ETERNITY OF GOD.

Thou hadst no youth, great God!
An Unbeginning End Thou art;
Thy glory in itself abode,

And still abides in its own tranquil heart:
No age can heap its outward years on Thee:
Dear God! Thou art Thyself Thine own eternity!

Without an end or bound

Thy life lies all outspread in light;

Our lives feel Thy life all around,

Making our weakness strong, our darkness bright;
Yet is it neither wilderness nor sea,

But the calm gladness of a full eternity.

Oh Thou art very great

To set Thyself so far above!

But we partake of Thine estate,
Established in Thy strength and in Thy love:
That love hath made eternal room for me
In the sweet vastness of its own eternity.

Oh Thou art very meek

To overshade Thy creatures thus!
Thy grandeur is the shade we seek;
To be eternal is Thy use to us:

Ah, Blessed God! what joy it is to me
To lose all thought of self in Thine eternity!

Self-wearied, Lord! I come;

For I have lived my life too fast :

Now that years bring me nearer home

Grace must be slowly used to make it last;

When my heart beats too quick I think of Thee,

And of the leisure of Thy long eternity.

Farewell, vain joys of earth!
Farewell, all love that is not His!

Dear God! be Thou my only mirth,

Thy majesty my single timid bliss!

Oh in the bosom of eternity

Thou dost not weary of Thyself, nor we of Thee!

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How easily his words flow, even when he is saying the deepest things! The poem is full of the elements of the finest mystical metaphysics, and yet there is no effort in their expression. The tendency to find God beyond, rather than in our daily human conditions, is discernible; but only as a tendency.

What a pity that the sects are so slow to become acquainted with the grand best in each other!

I do not find in Dr. Newman either a depth or a precision equal to that of Dr. Faber. His earlier poems indicate a less healthy condition of mind. His Dream of Gerontius is, however, a finer, as more ambitious poem than any of Faber's. In my judgment there are weak passages in it, with others of real grandeur. But I am perfectly aware of the difficulty, almost impossibility, of doing justice to men from some of whose forms of thought I am greatly repelled, who creep from the sunshine into every ruined archway, attracted by the brilliance with which the light from its loophole glows in its caverned gloom, and the hope of discovering within it the first steps of a stair winding up into the blue heaven. I apologize for the unavoidable rudeness of a critic who would fain be honest if he might; and I humbly thank all such as Dr. Newman, whose verses, revealing their saintship, make us long to be holier men.

Of his, as of Faber's, I have room for no more than It was written off Sardinia.

one.

DR. NEWMAN-SIR AUBREY DE VERE. 321

DESOLATION.

O say not thou art left of God,

Because His tokens in the sky

Thou canst not read: this earth He trod
To teach thee He was ever nigh.

He sees, beneath the fig-tree green,
Nathaniel con His sacred lore;
Shouldst thou thy chamber seek, unseen
He enters through the unopened door.
And when thou liest, by slumber bound,
Outwearied in the Christian fight,
In glory, girt with saints around,

He stands above thee through the night.
When friends to Emmaus bend their course,
He joins, although He holds their eyes:
Or, shouldst thou feel some fever's force,
He takes thy hand, He bids thee rise.
Or on a voyage, when calms prevail,
And prison thee upon the sea,

He walks the waves, He wings the sail,
The shore is gained, and thou art free.

Sir Aubrey de Vere is a poet profound in feeling, and gracefully tender in utterance. I give one short poem and one sonnet.

S.L. IV.

REALITY.

Love thy God, and love Him only:
And thy breast will ne'er be lonely.

In that one great Spirit meet

All things mighty, grave, and sweet.
Vainly strives the soul to mingle
With a being of our kind:

Vainly hearts with hearts are twined:

For the deepest still is single.

An impalpable resistance

Holds like natures still at distance.

Mortal! love that Holy One!

Or dwell for aye alone.

Y