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Updated: June 1, 2025
Gerontius, abandoned by his own troops, escaped to the confines of Spain; and rescued his name from oblivion, by the Roman courage which appeared to animate the last moments of his life. In the middle of the night, a great body of his perfidious soldiers surrounded and attacked his house, which he had strongly barricaded.
'Oh, why not? said Ancrum, with a shrug, 'if life's long enough' and he absently lifted and let fall a book which lay on the table beside him; it was Newman's 'Dream of Gerontius' 'if life's long enough, and happy enough! Well, so you've been learning French, I can hear. Teaching yourself? 'No; there's an old Frenchman, old Barbier do you know him, sir? He gives lessons at a shilling an hour.
And there was an open piano! He went over to it and bent down. "Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo! Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul! Go from this world!" So she loved "Gerontius," that intimate musical expression of the wonder and the strangeness of the Soul! He did not remember he had told her that he loved it. He stood gazing at the score.
He was bitterly disappointed; but the growth of public esteem had given him self-confidence, and he did not again fall into despondency, though he had a strange presentiment of approaching death, which prompted his last famous poem, 'The Dream of Gerontius. A second attempt to go to Oxford was thwarted by enemies at Home and in England in 1866-7.
His slaves when all the missile weapons were spent, fled at the dawn of day; and Gerontius, if he had not been restrained by conjugal tenderness, might have imitated their example; till the soldiers, provoked by such obstinate resistance, applied fire on all sides to the house. In this fatal extremity, he complied with the request of his Barbarian friend, and cut off his head.
The proconsul Antiochus was the unworthy son of a respectable father; and Gerontius, who commanded the provincial troops, was much better qualified to execute the oppressive orders of a tyrant, than to defend, with courage and ability, a country most remarkably fortified by the hand of nature.
Besides the works above mentioned he wrote, among others, The Arians of the Fourth Century , Twelve Lectures , Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics , Idea of a University, Romanism and Popular Protestantism, Disquisition on the Canon of Scripture, and his poem, The Dream of Gerontius.
When I am good, it is my mood to be good; when I am what is called wicked, it is my mood to be evil. I never know what I shall be at a particular moment. Sometimes I like to sit at home after dinner and read 'The dream of Gerontius. I love lentils and cold water. At other times I must drink absinthe, and hang the night hours with scarlet embroideries.
Newman's poems are not so well known as his prose, but the reader who examines the Lyra Apostolica and Verses on Various Occasions will find many short poems that stir a religious nature profoundly by their pure and lofty imagination; and future generations may pronounce one of these poems, "The Dream of Gerontius," to be Newman's most enduring work.
Nigel was sitting up, but leaning against cushions on the divan close to the upright piano, on which stood the score of "Gerontius." Isaacson was standing before him, bending, and holding both his hands strongly, in an attitude that looked almost violent.
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