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72 and original; he was gifted musically and artistically, and possessed, in the words of his poet-friend Robert Bridges, "humour, great personal charm, and the most attractive virtues of a tender and sympathetic nature." Above and beyond all this, his was the awakened soul; and something of his absorption in spiritual things may be guessed from the opening stanzas of a little undated Hymn:

It was in October, 1866, his twenty-third year, that he was received by Newman himself into the fold of Catholicity, finding there the one unchanging haven of a life in which—to a degree mercifully unknown by mediocre souls—God willed to decree not peace but a sword.

One reckons among Gerard's lesser privileges his youthful intercourse with that rare and cultured spirit, Walter Pater. It was through this friend's preparation that he entered in 1867 upon his classical first course at Balliol College, Oxford. But to those fair, scholastic precincts the young undergraduate had brought a yet fairer vision—a burden of unrest, indeed, until that vision should be wrought into reality. Just how early the ascetic and sacerdotal ideal had taken possession of the convert's heart one perceives from a poem of great beauty, "The Habit of Perfection," written in the year of his reception. All through its stanzas rings the cry of that great renunciation which was soon to be:—

Elected Silence sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.