‘This is only a fresh instance of what I suppose one must make up one’s mind to think, and what is consoling to think, that those who are early taken away are the fittest to be taken, and that it is a privilege so to be taken, and that they are in their proper place when taken. Surely God would not separate from us such, except it were best both for them and for us; and that those who are taken away are such as are most acceptable to Him seems proved by what we see: for scarcely do you hear of some especial instance of religious excellence, but you have also cause of apprehension how long such a one is to continue here…. We pray daily: “Thy Kingdom come”: if we understand our words, we mean it as a privilege to leave the world, and we must not wonder that God grants the privilege to some of those who pray for it, … pray for our eventual re-gathering, but our dispersion in the interval. The more we live in the world that is not seen, the more shall we feel that the removal of friends into that unseen world is a bringing them near to us, not a separation. Our Saviour’s going brought Him nearer, though invisibly, in the Spirit.’ It is all reticent and impersonal, but it rises, before his great battle begins, from Newman’s stricken lonely heart. ‘Thou doomed to die,’ as he had said, long before, in his poem, ‘David and Jonathan’: ‘Thou doomed to die: he on us to impress The portent of a blood-stained holiness.’ Last of all, come from his half-unwilling hand the lines well-known to students of sacred verse. ‘Dearest! he longs to speak, as I to know: And yet we both refrain.’ What beauty is in that word ‘refrain,’ a filament of English feeling kept between the quick and the dead! It occurs in a little afterthought of a stanza, which was the only poetic offering of Newman’s pen to Hurrell Froude gone.[265] Never was there so imponderable an obituary; nor ever any more exquisitely in keeping.