O blest above the sons of men! For thou, with more than Prophet’s ken, Deep in the secrets of the tomb Hast read thine own, thine endless doom; Thou by the hand of the Most High Art sealed for immortality. So may I read thy story right, And in my flesh so tame my spright, That when the Mighty Ones go forth, And from the east and from the north Unwilling ghosts shall gathered be, I, in my lot,[137] may stand with thee!’ And immediately after, linked with a quotation from the beloved Eclogues: ‘I send you some sawney verses…. Can these be doctored into anything available, or are they dotings?’ ‘OLD SELF AND NEW SELF.[138] NEW SELF. ‘Why sittest thou on that sea-girt rock, With downward look and sadly-dreaming eye? Playest thou beneath with Proteus’ flock, Or with the far-bound sea-bird wouldst thou fly? OLD SELF. I sit upon this sea-girt rock With downward look and dreaming eye; But neither do I sport with Proteus’ flock, Nor with the far-bound sea-bird would I fly. I list the splash, so clear and chill, Of yon old fisher’s solitary oar; I watch the waves, that rippling still, Chase one another o’er the marble shore. NEW SELF. Yet from the splash of yonder oar No dreary sound of sadness comes to me; And the fresh waves that beat the shore, How merrily they splash, how merrily! OLD SELF. I mourn for the delicious days When those calm sounds fell on my childish ear, A stranger yet to the wild ways Of triumph and remorse, of hope and fear. NEW SELF. Mourn’st thou, poor soul? and wouldst thou yet Call back the things which shall not, can not be? Heaven must be won, not dreamed; thy task is set: Peace was not made for earth, nor rest for thee.’ Four other sacred poems which Hurrell wrote in 1833 may as well be given here. He and Newman burst into song together, though he with far more remote and infrequent music. Probably no lyrist ever had such a poor opinion of himself. But in the qualities of clearness, simplicity, orderly thought and noble severity, there is something very remarkable in Hurrell’s few brief scattered verses. They have a strong singleness and sad transparency, the tone of them a little chilly, yet almost Virgilian, and arrestingly beautiful; they, like himself, are impersonal, and full of character; abstinent, concentrated, true. The unexpected grace is their cunning harmony, and the trick of that is neither derived nor deliberately invented. His every line instinctively sings and flies. He has nothing to match a certain refrain of Newman’s, in what he calls his ‘ecclesiastical carol,’―― ‘For scantness is still Heaven’s might.’