Ossian Collection > Aspects of poetry

CHAPTER XV.
PROSE POETS. CARDINAL NEWMAN.
During the first fifty years of this century, there
were living in England three men, three teachers of
men, each of whom appealed to what is highest in
man, to the moral and spiritual side of human nature,
and by that appeal told most powerfully on his gener-
ation. These men were William Wordsworth, Thomas
Carlyle, and John Henry Newman. Each gathered
round himself in time, whether consciously or not,
a group of disciples, whom he influenced, and who
became conductors of his influence to the minds of his
countrymen. All three were idealists, believers in the
mental and spiritual forces, as higher than the material,
and as ruling them — but idealists each after his own
fashion. The strength of each lay in a large measure
in his imagination, and in the power with which he
stirred his fellow-men, by bearing home to their imagin-
ations his own views of truth. But here any likeness
between them begins and ends.
No three men of power, living in the same epoch,
lived more aloof from each other, borrowed less from