Newman's great reputation for prose and the supreme interest attaching to his life seem to have obscured the fame he might have won as a poet. He was in poetry, as in theology, a more masculine Keble, but with all the real purity of Keble, with also the indispensable flavor of earth. --_H. Walker._ The _Dream of Gerontius_ resembles Dante more than any other poetry written since the great Tuscan's time. --_Sir Henry Taylor._ The _Dream_ is a rare poetic rendering into English verse of that high ritual which from the death-bed to the Mass of Supplication encompasses the faithful soul.... Newman has no marked affinities with English writers of his day. He is strikingly different from Macaulay, whose eloquence betrays the fury, as it is annealed in the fire, of the Western Celt. To Ruskin, who deliberately built up a monument, stately as the palace of Kubla Khan, he is a contrast, for the very reason that he does not handle words as if they were settings in architecture or colors in a palette; rather, he would look upon them as transparencies which let his meaning through. He is more like De Quincey, but again no player upon the organ for the sake of its music; and that which is common to both is the literary tradition of the eighteenth century enhanced by a power to which abstract and concrete yielded in almost equal degree.... With so prompt and intense an intellect at his call, there was no subject, outside purely technical criticism, which Newman could not have mastered. --_Barry's Literary Lives._ It is when Newman exerts his flexible and vivid imagination in depicting the deepest religious passion that we are most carried away by him and feel his great genius most truly.... Whether tried by the test of nobility, intensity, and steadfastness of his work, or by the test of the greatness of the powers which have been consecrated to that work, Cardinal Newman has been one of the greatest of our modern great men. --_R. H. Hutton's Life of Newman._ Newman's mind was world-wide. He was interested in everything that was going on in science, in the highest form of politics, in literature.... Nothing was too large for him, nothing too trivial, if it threw light upon the central question,--what man really is and what is his destiny. --_J. A. Froude._ In Newman's sketch of the influence of Abelard on his disciples is seen his belief in the immense power for good or ill of a dominating personality. And he himself supplied an object-lesson in his theory. Shairp, Froude, Church, Wilberforce, Gladstone, are only a few of those who have borne testimony to the personal magnetism which left its mark on the whole of thinking Oxford. "Cor ad cor loquitur," the motto chosen by Newman on his receiving the Cardinal's hat, expressed to him the whole reality of intercourse between man and man, and man and God. --_Wilfrid Ward's Problems and Persons._