Ossian Collection > Aspects of poetry

XV.] CARDINAL NEWMAN. 463
them ; or thou biddest them to be gone, where they will be more
welcome ; or thou sellest them for nought to the stranger that
passes by. And what wilt thou do in the end thereof ? '
One thing must have struck most persons, — always the
pensiveness, often the sadness of tone which pervades
these extracts ; and this impression would not be lessened
by a perusal of the sermons in full. It is so. The view
of life taken by Dr. Newman is more than grave, it is
a sad, sometimes almost a heartbroken one.
Canon Liddon has somewhere asked, ' How is a man
likely to look upon his existence ? Is existence a happi-
ness or a misery, a blessing or a curse ? ' And he replies,
' This question will, probably, be answered in accordance
with deep-rooted tendencies of individual temperament ;
but these tendencies, when prolonged and emphasised,
become systems of doctrine — as we call them, philo-
sophies. And so it is that there are two main ways of
looking at human life and its surrounding liabilities,
which are called optimism and pessimism.' There is
a whole order of minds, and these sometimes the most
thoughtful and deep, on whom the sad side of things,
the dark enigmas of existence, weigh so heavily, that the
brighter side seems as though it were not. Those
especially who enter on life with a high ideal, whether
a merely aesthetic, or a moral and spiritual ideal, get it
sorely tried by their intercourse with the world. All
they see and meet with in actual experience so contra-
dicts the high vision they once had. And with the