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This selection includes works on and about Hopkins, such as the first biography, G. F. Lahey’s Gerard Manley Hopkins. A Jesuit and early collector of Hopkins, Lahey maintained regular conversation with Joseph Keating, another early Jesuit interested in Hopkins, and Robert Bridges. Lahey would hold Bridges’s feet to the flame to release the Hopkins letters, calling it “intolerable, and contrary to the principles of scrupulous and painstaking biography.” The Lahey Papers in the Jesuit Provincial Archives at Farm Street, London, contain valuable information on the earliest work on Hopkins, including the misattribution by Alfred Thomas of a poem by Hopkins, “Original Lines on a Fossil Tree in a Garden at Highgate.” The collection also contains information on Hopkins from Joseph Rickaby, S.J., a fellow with Hopkins for three years in Theology: Rickaby drawing attention to Hopkins’s failure in theology and his concerns for the poor; Bridges wanting to show Lahey Hopkins’s unpublished verse; Lahey’s discovery of the Newman letters; and Hopkins’s sister Kate’s letter on Gerard’s hatred of ugliness. And there is this salient reflection on Gerard from Father Darlington, who writes on 13 July 1928: “H. had developed a remarkable platonic life as a Poet & Religious – his outward appearance, & his conversation adapted to the company of men he was – reveals little of his inner self…. H. was always full of fun simple jokes. He could not play the piano at all – but he occupied a good deal of his leisure in writing original musical accompaniment for Song Sylvia Who is She? Took him some time….”

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The remaining material contains a page from Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, in which Merton received spiritual prompting from reading Hopkins biography, written by Lahey (1930): “All of a sudden,” writes Merton, “something began to stir within me, something began to push me, to prompt me. It was a movement that spoke like a voice.” Boston College opened What are We? with Hopkins’s poem, “God’s Grandeur,” and Michael Harter’s Hearts on Fire, Praying with Jesuits (2004), similarly opens with “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” One might wish to consider here Hopkins countless references to heart in his poems and sermons, especially his Liverpool sermon for Sunday, 26 June 1881, on “The Sacred Heart.”

The collection also includes some prints, digital copies, a Hopkins icon with its otherworldly gaze, called “Amidst the Fire Folk,” the title taken from his poem “The Starlight Night,” and a book inscribed by Kate on 2 April 1881, Richard Frederick Littledale’s Plain Reasons Against Joining the Church of Rome (1880), written to address “those who have seceded, or are tempted to secession, from the Church of England to the Roman Communion; that they may see what is the true nature of the accountability with which they are charging themselves in following their own private judgment rather than the providential order of God.” Acquisition of the book might mean that fifteen years later Gerard’s family was still struggling with their son’s decision to convert.

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Boston College’s Professor Paul Mariani joins the collection, with his insightful essay, “Revisiting the Catholic Imagination”. Paul offers a reading of “As kingfishers catch fire” to explore Hopkins’s verbalness of being: “what I do is me.” Paul calls this the “doing-be, the essential inscape of the thing,” to discover that “Each thing, then, doing what it was made to do, whether made by mortals, or—better—by the great God Creator.” This, says Paul, is the “sacral imagination,” discovering, inscaping as it were, Christ in each created thing. In Hopkins, the “Catholic imagination adds to the reading of creation.”

Boston College students are encouraged to read the poetry of Hopkins. Freshman are given a copy of the book What are We? It was “written to introduce them to Boston College as a Jesuit and Catholic university. It also explains something of the distinctive spiritual vision that led to the founding of Boston College and that still animates BC today.”

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Hearts on fire : praying with Jesuits is available for students at Boston College Campus Ministry. The Office of Campus Ministry, faithful to its Jesuit, Catholic heritage, attends to the sacramental and pastoral needs of the Boston College Community.

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This volume from the Burns Library Thomas Merton Collection shows the page in which Merton received spiritual prompting from reading Lahey’s biography of Hopkins. Although Merton had for some time been pondering joining the Church, reading this passage became a defining moment for him. He put the book down and went to tell Father Ford, a priest at Corpus Christi Church in New York, “I want to become a Catholic.”

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