Gerard Manley Hopkins Adrian Grafe (bio) Hopkins the metaphysician takes center stage in several recent studies of the poet—and rightly so. Hopkins's Oxford education, scholastic training as a Jesuit, serendipitous discovery of Duns Scotus, and speculative interest in metaphysics combine to make him the most philosophically engaged poet of the Victorian period. Relatively neglected by literary researchers who may be without the philosophical, scholastic, and theological background that Hopkins had, yet indispensable for an understanding of Hopkins, this is a demanding interdisciplinary topic, and the scholars concerned more than rise to the challenge. Atti Viragh's "The Grammar of Instress: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Philosophers of Mind" (New Literary History 51, no. 3 (Summer 2020): 501–522) draws on late nineteenth-century philosophical culture in Britain as a context within which to reflect on Hopkins's innovative thought. The article begins with Hopkins and his student essay "The Probable Future of Metaphysics" and goes on to describe some aspects of contemporary inquiry into problems of mind, philosophy, and psychology, especially those considered by the journal Mind, founded in 1876 (hence coeval with Hopkins's "The Wreck of the Deutschland," the poem that established his new poetics, begun in December 1875 and completed several months later). The article then explores two of Hopkins's key neologisms, "instress" and "inscape." Thereafter, in the light of what has been said so far, Viragh focuses on one particular poem, "Spring and Fall," in order to examine how the poem brings together the respective intuitions of the child addressee and the adult speaker, including the adult's insight into the child's intuition that death comes to all living things, including herself. The article thus delves into ways in which the poet understands and articulates experience. Viragh writes, "Terms like 'instress' and 'inscape' emerge here [in Hopkins's diaries] in the midst of his effort to understand the intensities of his experience of the natural world" (p. 505). This is perhaps truer of the poet's philosophical writings, since the diaries read as their author's spontaneous responses to natural phenomena, and he pens his terms equally spontaneously, since by the time he came to make his nature notations, he had [End Page 382] already fixed his terms. We are wholly in agreement with Viragh when he goes against the widely held view that "inscape" refers to "individuating design" (p. 506), a view long countered in many works by René Gallet, as well as when, drawing on John Henry Newman (as in the first half of Viragh's title, alluding to Newman's An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent [1870]), he makes the distinction, entirely valid for Hopkins, between the "lived experience" of something and the "logical concept" of it (p. 513). With regard to the idea of instress, given the foregrounding of grammar in Viragh's title, one might have hoped for more questioning of the terms "instress" and "inscape" as functioning as both nouns and verbs. They begin their written life as nouns in Hopkins's "Parmenides" text, and it would be enlightening to track down the first time(s) Hopkins used them as verbs. Surely there is a difference both philosophical and experiential between the instress or inscape of something (among other examples taken from Hopkins's diaries, Viragh cites the inscape of mountains and ash trees and the instress of the moon, bluebells, and roses [p. 505]) and, for example, the "beholder" (Hopkins's word) inscaping or instressing a phenomenon. To take but one example of each, Hopkins writes in his journal about how he usually looked at the sun and a sunset separately: "but today [March 12, 1870] I inscaped them together" (CW 2: 484),1 presumably meaning that he identified and took in the natural principle common to both. The occurrence of instress, whether as noun or verb, seems to be less common than inscape, but one finds an example of the verb in Hopkins's theological prose reflection "On Creation and Redemption" inspired by the Ignatian Exercises, in which "Michael and his angels instressed and distressed them [Lucifer and the disobedient angels] with the thought of their unlikeness to the Most...