of literature, it would seem; we must achieve originality—and often at the cost of so much complexity. Not a few of us, indeed, would appear to have been born complex, with a congenital impulse toward entangling an existence already difficult enough. But there is one ineradicable simplicity about religious men: they are always coming back upon God. To Him they reach out, and peradventure attain, through the mysteries of Nature, through the mazes of science and abstract speculation, even through the fundamental intricacies of their own temperament. His Spirit they perceive brooding above the patient earth, glorifying and illumining her travail. And so one finds Father Hopkins' ulti-mate message, clarion-clear, in this very direct and characteristic sonnet upon "God's Grandeur":
The world is charged with the grandeur of God,
It will flame out like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck His rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,
And bears man's smudge, and shares man's smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights from the black west went,
Oh, morning at the brown brink eastwards springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast, and with, ah, bright wings!
The vital and arresting quality of this little poem distinguishes all of Gerard Hopkins' religious poetry; and it is in his religious poetry, after all, that he attained most unequivocally.
