ing empire of the Holy Ghost over an undivided Church, and all the multitudinous sacramentalisms of a living Catholicity—must needs have stretched the horizon upon every side. Such ideas are fountain-heads of art as well as of faith, in the second harvesting. But meanwhile it was an interval of great spiritual struggle. A few months more and John Henry Newman was to break at last from that hopeless Via Media, lighting the pathway for so many other souls "ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem." All through Gerard's childhood and during his preliminary education at the Cholmondeley School, Highgate, this august exodus continued; Faber and the Oratorians were followed by Manning, Patmore, Aubrey and Stephen de Vere, Adelaide Procter and Mother Frances Raphael Drane—only the angels of God can number them all. And if, to-day, we bow down in spirit before that mighty crusade of half a century ago, what must have been the moral effect upon a highly-sensitive contemporary spirit? It was an effect which found expression less in words than in the complete fusing and fashioning of the spiritual energies; to those who could receive it, it provided both motive-power and motive for existence.
We own no surprise, then, in discovering that the wood of Gerard Hopkins' cross lay just beyond his door-sill. But in the wise and sweet economy of life, the cross for most of us is pilgrim-staff as well. This poet's pathway was not destined to lead beside the pleasant ways of garden or hearthstone; it was to know conflict from without and from within; but these consolations, more especially in youth, were notable. By nature—that is to say, God—he had been rarely dowered. His intellect was keen and scholarly, his imagination peculiarly quick, subtle
