Abstract
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born at Stradford, near London, on July 28, 1844.1 That year, incidentally, was a year of significance. The Oxford Tracts had done their work; the face of religion was changed; art and literature were taking on the buoyancy of progress and the weightiness of scientism. The tremendous re-discovery, by certain discontented thinkers within the Anglican Church, of the Christian past must needs have widened the horizons on every side. Meanwhile it was an interval of great spiritual struggle. A few months more and John Henry Newman was to break at last from that hopeless "via media," blazing the pathway for many other souls "from the shadow of uncertainty unto the Truth." All through Gerard’s childhood, and during his preliminary education at the Cholmondeley School, Highgate, this exodus continued and must have been a powerful moral influence upon his highly sensitive spirit.