One must needs surmise a great part of this final struggle; but it would seem to illustrate that spiritual phenomenon of desolation which has immersed so many a chosen soul. For full thirty years was St. Teresa in this desert land, where frustration reigns in all visible things, and to lose the life without finding it again seems the guerdon of superhuman effort. Of course, it is impossible to write healthy poetry in the depths of this tragic experience; and Father Hopkins was too true a poet not to realise the fact. He submitted, the very year of his death, his noble and highly masterful apologia:
"To———
The fine delight that fathers thought; the strong
Spur, live and lancing like the blowpipe flame,
Breathes once, and, quenched faster than it came,
Leaves yet the mind a mother of immortal song,
Nine months she then, nay years, nine years she long
Within her wears, bears, cares and moulds the same:
The widow of an insight lost she lives, with aim
Not known, and hand at work now never wrong.
Sweet fire, the sire of muse, my soul needs this;
I want the one rapture of an inspiration.
O then if in my lagging lines you miss
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,
My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss
Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.
His winter world! It was destined sooner than he dreamed to give place to the unwaning spring. Robert Bridges (to whose words we turn once again, because the knowledge of a physician as well as the wisdom of a friend went into them) declares that he made no struggle for life when the fever of 1889 attacked him. He had fought his good fight and carried arms no longer; but the God of Battles knew. And on the 8th of June—the month he had loved so well—Gerard
