There is nothing romantic in either temper or style about Newman’s poems, all of which are devotional in subject, and one of which—­“The Pillar of the Cloud” ("Lead, Kindly Light”) (1833)—­is a favourite hymn in most Protestant communions.  The most ambitious of these is “The Dream of Gerontius,” a sort of mystery play which Sir Henry Taylor used to compare with the “Divine Comedy.”  Indeed, none but Dante has more poignantly expressed the purgatorial passion, the desire for pain, which makes the spirits in the flames of purification unwilling to intermit their torments even for a moment.  The “happy, suffering soul” of Gerontius lies before the throne of the Crucified and sings: 

  “Take me away, and in the lowest deep
        There let me be,
  And there in hope the lone night-watches keep
        Told out for me.” [13]

Some dozen years before the “Tracts for the Times” began to appear at Oxford, a sporadic case of conversion at the sister university offers a closer analogy with the catholicising process among the German romantics.  Kenelm Henry Digby, who took his degree at Trinity College in 1819, and devoted himself to the study of mediaeval antiquities and scholastic philosophy, was actually led into the Catholic fold by his enthusiasm for the chivalry romances, as Pugin was by his love of Gothic architecture.  His singular book, “The Broad Stone of Honour,” was first published in 1822, and repeatedly afterwards in greatly enlarged form.  In its final edition it consists of four books entitled respectively “Godefridus,” “Tancredus,” “Morus” (Sir Thomas More), and “Orlandus,” after four representative paladins of Christian chivalry.  The title of the whole work was suggested by the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, the “Gibraltar of the Rhine.”  Like Fouque, Digby was inspired by the ideal of knighthood, but he emphasises not so much the gallantry of the knight-errant as his religious character as the champion of Holy Church.  The book is, loosely speaking, an English “Genie du Christianisme,” less brilliantly rhetorical than Chateaubriand, but more sincerely devout.  It is poetic and descriptive rather than polemical, though the author constantly expresses his dislike of modern civilisation, and complains with Burke that this is an age of sophists, calculators, and economists.  He quotes profusely from German and French reactionaries, like Busching,[14] Fritz Stolberg, Goerres, Friedrich Schlegel, Lamennais, and Joseph de Maistre, and illustrates his topic at every turn from mediaeval chronicles, legendaries, romances, and manuals of chivalry; from the lives of Charlemagne, St. Louis, Godfrey of Bouillon, the Chevalier Bayard, St. Anselm, King Rene, etc., and above all, from the “Morte Darthur.”  He defends the Crusades, the Templars, and the monastic orders against such historians as Muller, Sismondi, and Hume; is very contemptuous of the Protestant concessions of Bishop Hurd’s “Letters on Chivalry and