"Take me away, and in the lowest deep There let me be." Why Cardinal Newman should have presented the experience of a soul after death as a "dream" we can imagine from his habitual caution in dealing with all subjects of importance. He has the boldness of neither Dante nor Milton, and he will not present the poetical experience of a man, at such a vitally sacred moment, as an actual fact; he is too reverential for that, and he calls it a "Dream." In a letter written in answer to an inquiry as to the meaning of the lines in "The Pillar of the Cloud," "And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile,"-- he says, quoting Keble, that poets are "not bound to be critics or to give a sense to what they had written,"[8] and he adds that "there must be a statute of limitations, or it would be quite a tyranny, if in an art which is the expression not of truth but of imagination and sentiment, one were obliged to stand an examination on the transient state of mind which came upon one when homesick, or seasick, or in any other way sensitive or excited." It is well to take a great poem like this without too much inquiry or analysis. If the author's intention is not evident in his poem, either he has failed to be clear, or he is consciously obscure, or we are incapable of appreciating his work. The first and second defects do not appear in "The Dream of Gerontius." The third, let us trust, does not exist in us. The notes, few in number, are intended to explain only what is not obvious. In his "Recollections" Aubrey De Vere says: "'The Dream of Gerontius,' as Newman informed me, owed its preservation to an accident. He had written it on a sudden impulse, put it aside and forgotten it. The editor of a magazine"--it appeared in _The Month_, of London, 1865, in two parts--"wrote to him asking for a contribution. He looked into all his pigeon-holes and found nothing theological; but, in answering his correspondent, he added that he had come upon some verses which, if, as editor, he cared to have, were at his command. The wise editor did care, and they were published at once."