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 it 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!

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 one.  It was written off Sardinia.

  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.