enough he gauged the cause of so much bitterness; it was the "blight man was born for" if he happened to be an idealist—it was the conscious-ness of his own too-twisted nature. "It is Margaret you mourn for," he told one little Margaret as she grieved over the falling glory of autumn; but none the less, outer conditions will all along furnish the occasion of Margaret's grief. There cannot be any doubt that Father Hopkins' life in Dublin was a final crucifixion of spirit as well as body. It was not only the monotonous and consuming toil of his position as examiner in the University; it was not merely the political irregularity and unreason by which he was perforce surrounded; although we are told that these combined to plunge his final years into a state of utter dejection. One of the sonnets of this period (all of which are coloured by an ominous and leaden grey) reveals his sense of exile—"To seem the stranger lies my lot—my life among strangers"— and expresses his human and priestly sorrow that
Father and mother dear,
Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near.
But there is another which would seem to indicate that the cause of Father Hopkins' darkness lay deeper down than loneliness (too familiar to the sons of St. Ignatius) or than any normal weariness of the day's work. Few lines of such haunting sadness have come to us from the hand of any Christian poet:
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With Thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just,
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my Friend,
How couldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? . . . . .
