the face of a youthful Englishman, whose eyes might already have known Gethsemane.
For a while, and until the sensitive, harassed spirit almost broke beneath the strain, Father Gerard laboured in the slums of Liverpool. Thence he passed to a professorship in the philosophic precincts of Stonyhurst. Finally, in 1884, having been elected Fellow of the Royal University of Ireland, he was appointed to the post of classical-examiner at Dublin. And there, five years later, he succumbed to a contagious fever and died. It was a bloodless martyrdom—one knows that now—a story of tragic consecration to duty and of a heart predestined to suffering. And the poetic life was but the silent, passionate undercurrent to this all-absorbing ministry—a life too ruthlessly mortified at first, then cultivated sedulously, intricately, but more and more as a refuge from actual things.
Gerard Hopkins had written poetry as a boy; in fact (like Milton and Crashaw, and some others never destined to attain their eminence), his verses won him distinction at school. But in the first fervour of his novitiate, and doubtless as a costly exercise of detachment, he burned nearly all these youthful poems. One fragment survived, a "Vision of Mermaids," written back in 1862. Its lyric sweetness carries a momentary suggestion of Tennyson, but in its sensuous love of beauty there is an abiding affinity to the poet of Endymion. Here is a vignette of early summer, charming in its blithe and sunny abandonment:—
Soon—as when Summer of his sister Spring
Crushes and tears the rare enjewelling,
And boasting "I have fairer things than these,"
Plashes amid the billowy apple-trees
His lusty hands, in gusts of scented wind
Swirling out bloom till all the air is blind
