hymn, Lead Kindly Light, remains a favorite with all Christian denominations. The Dream of Gerontius (1865) is a poem that has been called "the happiest effort to represent the unseen world that has been made since the time of Dante." Those who are not interested in Newman's Episcopal or Catholic sermons or in his great theological treatises will find some of his best prose in the work known as The Idea of a University. This volume, containing 521 pages, is composed of discussions, lectures, and essays, prepared while he was rector of the University at Dublin. Newman's prose is worthy of close study for the following reasons: --- (1) His style is a clear, transparent medium for the presentation of thought. He molded his sentences with the care of an artist. He said: "I have been obliged to take great pains with everything I have ever written, and I often write chapters over and over again, besides innumerable corrections and interlinear additions.” His definition of style is "a thinking out into language," not an ornamental "addition from without." He employs his characteristic irony in ridiculing those who think that "one man could do the thought and another the style": "We read in Persian travels of the way in which young gentlemen go to work in the East, when they would engage in correspondence with those who inspire them with hope or fear. They cannot write one sentence themselves; so they betake themselves to the professional letter writer. . . . The man of thought comes to the man of words; and the man of words duly instructed in the thought, dips the pen of desire into the ink of devotedness, and proceeds to spread it over the page of desolation. Then the nightingale of affection is heard to warble to the rose of loveliness, while the breeze of anxiety plays around the brow of expectation. This is what the Easterns are said to consider fine writ ing; and it seems pretty much the idea of the school of critics to whom 1 have been referring."1 It was a pleasure to him to "think out" expressions like the following: "Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt." "Caiculation never made a hero." "Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." (2) Like Macaulay, Newman excelled in the use of the concrete. In his Historical Sketches, he imagines the agent of a London company sent to inspect Attica: "He would report that the climate was mild; the hills were limestone; there was plenty of good marble; more pasture land than at first survey might have been expected, sufficient certainly for sheep and goats; fisheries productive; silver mines once, but long since worked out; figs fair; oil first rate; olives in profusion. . . He would not tell how that same delicate and brilliant atmosphere freshened up the pale olive till the olive forgot its monotony, and its cheek glowed like the arbutus or the beech of the Umbrian hills. " A general statement about superseding "the operation of the laws of the universe in a multitude of ways" does not satisfy him. He specifies those ways when he records his belief that saints have "raised the dead to life, crossed the sea without vessels, multiplied grain and bread, cured incurable diseases." (3) He modestly called himself a rhetorician, but he possessed also the qualities of an acute thinker. He displayed unusual sagacity in detecting the value of different arguments in persuasion. He could arrange in proper proportion the most complex tangle of facts, so as to make one clear impression. Such power made him one of the great Victorian masters of argumentative prose. 1 The Idea of a University (Literature: A Lecture). From the painting by James McNeil Whistler, Glasgow Art Galleries. Thomas Carlyle THOMAS CARLYLE, 1795-1881 Life. Thomas Carlyle, who became one of the great tonic forces of the nineteenth century, was also most interested in spiritual growth. He specially emphasized the gospel of work as the only agency that could develop the atmosphere necessary for such growth, and, though deeply religious, he cared little for any special faith or creed. The son of a Scotch stone mason, Thomas Carlyle was born in 1795 at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. At the age of fourteen, the boy was ready for the University of Edinburgh, and he walked the eighty miles between it and his home. After he was graduated, he felt that he could not enter the ministry, as his parents wished. He therefore taught while he was considering what vocation to follow. In 1821 he met Jane Welsh, a brilliant and beautiful girl, descended on her father's side from John Knox and on her mother's from William Wallace. With the spirit of Wallace, she climbed in her girlhood up to places that a boy would have considered perilous. When she was forbidden to take up such a masculine study as Latin, she promptly learned to decline a Latin CRAIGENPUTTOCK noun. Carlyle had much trouble in winning her; but she finally consented to be his wife, and they were married in 1826. In 1828 they went to live for six lonely years on her farm at Craigenputtock, sixteen miles north of Dumfries, where it was so quiet that Mrs. Carlyle said she could hear the sheep nibbling the grass a quarter of a mile away. Ralph Waldo Emerson visited them here and formed a lifelong friendship with Carlyle. It was here that Carlyle fought the intense spiritual battle of his early life, here that he wrote his first great work, Sartor Resartus, which his wife pronounced "a work of genius, dear." It would be difficult to overestimate the beneficent influence which Mrs. Carlyle exerted over her husband in those trying days of poverty and spiritual stress. When her private correspondence was inadvisedly published after his death, she unwittingly became her husband's Boswell. For many years after the appearance of her letters, his personality and treatment of her were more discussed than his writings. Her references to marital unhappiness were for awhile given undue prominence; but with the passing of time there came a recognition MRS. CARLYLE of the fact that she was almost as brilliant a writer as her husband, that, like him, she was frequently ill, and that in expressing things in a striking way, she sometimes exercised his prerogative of exaggeration. "Carlyle has to take a journey always after writing a book," she declared, "and then gets so weary with knocking about that he has to write another book to recover from it." She once said that living with him was as bad as keeping a lunatic asylum. Unfortunately, his early privations had caused him to have chronic indigestion. He thought that the worst punishment he could suggest for Satan would be to compel him to "try to digest for all eternity with my stomach." This disorder rendered Carlyle peculiarly irascible and explosive. His wife's quick temper sometimes took fire at his querulousness; but her many actions, which spoke much louder than her words, showed how deeply she loved him and how proud she was of his genius. After |