There can be as little doubt that it brought on the malady that
abbreviated his life, as that it gave a melancholic tone to his thought
and filled his mind with gloomy forebodings.
The opening of his address was very beautiful. He recalls the impression
made upon him in his youth by the writing of Carlyle, Goethe, Emerson
and Francis Newman, and says:
"Forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in
the air which haunt my memory still. Happy the man who in that
susceptible season of youth hears such voices! they are a possession to
him forever. No such voices are there now. Oxford has more criticism
now, more knowledge, more light; but such voices as those of our youth
it has no longer. The name of Cardinal Newman is a great name to the
imagination still; his genius and his style are things of power..... A
greater voice still,--the greatest voice of the century,--came to us in
those youthful years through Carlyle: the voice of Goethe. To this
day,--such is the force of youthful associations,--I read his 'Wilhelm
Meister' with more pleasure in Carlyle's translation than in the
original. The large, liberal view of human life in 'Wilhelm Meister,'
how novel it was to the Englishman in those days! and it was salutary,
too, and educative for him, doubtless, as well as novel..... And besides
those voices, there came to us in that old Oxford time a voice also from
this side of the Atlantic,--a clear and pure voice, which for my ear, at
any rate, brought a strain as new, and moving, and unforgettable, as the
strain of Newman, or Carlyle, or Goethe.
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