It must be remembered that John Henry Newman had not yet entered the Catholic Church. It is strange that he should at this time have held the belief in a ministering spirit which is so marked in "The Dream of Gerontius." In the sextette of this sonnet he says: "Were I Christ's own, then fitly might I call That vision real; for to the thoughtful mind That walks with Him He half reveals His face; But when on earth-stained souls such tokens fall, These dare not claim as theirs what there they find, Yet, not all hopeless, eye His boundless grace." This vision, he says, "which haunted me,--the vision is more or less brought out in the whole series of compositions." "Gerontius" itself is more a "vision" than a "dream." "The Pillar of the Cloud" was written in an orange-boat. "We were becalmed a whole week in the Straits of Bonifaccio. Then it was," he says in the "Apologia"--the finest model of modern English prose extant--"that I wrote 'Lead, Kindly Light,' which has since become well known. I was writing verses the whole time of my passage." The "vision" of which he speaks he saw everywhere, and all his poems seem, in one way or other, to contain hints of the great poem to come; for there can be no doubt that "The Dream of Gerontius" is the culmination of his poetical moods. One cannot open any of his prose works without finding allusions to these eternal truths made so clear through the processes of the soul of a normal old man,--our young readers will please look up the derivation of Gerontius,[9] which is from the Greek,--but it is in his poems that we discover easily the germs of his poetical masterpiece. Even in the poems he loved we note the constant dwelling on the main theme of "The Dream"--Eternity. In 1889 Cardinal Newman was very ill. During his convalescence he asked that Faber's "Eternal Years"[A] should be sung to him with musical accompaniment. He said that he would like to hear it when he came to die. It is a poem of sixteen stanzas, to be found in Faber's "Hymns." It begins: "How shalt thou bear the cross that now So dread a weight appears? Keep quietly to God, and think Upon the eternal years. Austerity is little help, Although it sometimes cheers; Thine oil of gladness is the thought Of the eternal years." "Novissima hora est!" Gerontius exclaims, "and I fain would sleep." He is thinking of the eternal hours and years in this last hour on earth. At sea, in June, 1833, Newman had written some verses called "Hora Novissima": "Whene'er goes forth Thy dread command, And my last hour is nigh, Lord, grant me in a Christian land, As I was born, to die. "I pray not, Lord, that friends may be, Or kindred, standing by,-- Choice blessing! which I leave to Thee To grant me or deny.