er sought, the world they never found;
Still far before their toiling path the glimmering promise lay,
Still hovered round the struggling race, a dream by night and day.
Mid darkening care and clinging sin they sought their unknown home,
Yet ne'er the perfect glory came--Lord, will it ever come?
The weeding of earth's garden broad from all its growths of wrong,
When all man's soul shall be a prayer, and all his life a song.
Aye, though through many a starless night we guard the flaming oil,
Though we have watched a weary watch, and toiled a weary toil,
Though in the midnight wilderness, we wander still forlorn,
Yet bear we in our hearts the proof that God shall send the dawn.
Deep in the tablets of our hearts he writes that yearning still,
The longing that His hand hath wrought shall not his hand fulfil?
Though death shall close upon us all before that hour we see,
The goal of ages yet is there--the good time yet to be:
Therefore, tonight, from varied lips, in every house and home,
Goes up to God the common prayer, "Father, Thy Kingdom come."*

[* _The Debater_, Vol. I. March-April, 1891.]

Gilbert's prose work in _The Debater_ must have been little less
surprising to any master who had merely watched him slumbering at a
desk. His historical romance "The White Cockade" is immature and
unimportant. But essays on Spenser, Milton, Pope, Gray, Cowper,
Burns, Wordsworth, "Humour in Fiction," "Boys' Literature," Sir
Walter Scott, Browning, the English Dramatists, showed a range and a
quality of literary criticism alike surprising. Perhaps most
surprising, however, is the fact that all this does not seem to have
made clear to either masters or parents the true nature of Gilbert's
vocation. He suffered at this date from having too many talents. For
he still went on drawing and his drawings seemed to many the most
remarkable thing about him, and were certainly the thing he most
enjoyed doing.

Even now his school work had not brought him into the highest
form--called not the Sixth, as in most schools, but the Eighth: the
highest form he ever reached was 6B. But in the Summer term of 1892
he entered a competition for a prize poem, and won it. The subject
chosen was St. Francis Xavier. I give the poem in Appendix A. It is
not as notable as some other of his work at that time: what is
interesting is that in it this schoolboy expresses with some power a
view he was later to explode