THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS.

London, Burns Lambert and Oates, 1866.. SECOND EDITION 1866, PRINTED THE SAME YEAR AS THE FIRST EDITION. Small 8vo, approximately 120 x 75 mm, 4¾ x 3 inches, pages: [4], [5]-55, collation: A1-D4, original publisher's blind stamped brown limp cloth, gilt title to upper cover, original pale yellow endpapers. Slight rubbing to binding, first pastedown slightly creased, title page has slight blemish at the bottom due to adhesion by the endpaper, shallow turning crease to top corners of first few pages, otherwise a very good copy. The Dream of Gerontius consists of the prayer of a dying man, and angelic and demonic responses. The poem, written after Newman's conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, explores his new Catholic-held beliefs of the journey from death through Purgatory to God and thence to Paradise. The poem follows the main character as he nears death and then reawakens as a soul, preparing for judgment. Newman uses the death and judgement of Gerontius as a prism through which the reader is drawn to contemplation of their own fear of death and sense of unworthiness before God. His depiction of the overwhelmed Gerontius in Phase Seven of the poem, who begs to be taken for purgatorial cleansing rather than diminish the perfection of God and his courts of Saints and Angels by his continued presence, has become a popular expression of man's desire for healing through redemptive suffering. This scene of the poem has done much for the rehabilitation of the doctrine of purgatory which had previously come to be seen as a fearful terror rather than a state of final purification essentially positive in nature. Newman said that the poem "was written by accident and it was published by accident". He wrote it up in fair copy from fifty-two scraps of paper between 17 January and 7 February 1865 and published it in May and June of the same year, in two parts in the Jesuit periodical The Month. The poem inspired a choral work of the same name by Edward Elgar in 1900. (Wikipedia). MORE IMAGES ATTACHED TO THIS LISTING, ALL ZOOMABLE, FURTHER IMAGES ON REQUEST. POSTAGE AT COST.