Edward Smith is an English artist, uncle to Gerald Manly Hopkins. I find the extensive cultured aspect of Gerald Manly Hopkins upbringing interesting. Protestant in roots, Hopkins’ 1800s family is populated by male and female artists, poets, and intellectuals. His father was a poet who engaged in a competitively friendly artistic relationship with his son. His brothers were artists and illustrators promoting his own drawing efforts. Exploring the world through creative efforts, promoting artistic talents in one another, understanding the value of life–and therefore one’s spiritual life–was enhanced by the appreciation and exercising of the arts is rarefied air anymore. I am not the most knowledgeable about Hopkins’ conversion to Catholicism or his formation into a priest, yet I do find it disconcerting that he destroyed his poetry in the process. Alas, there is so much one does not know.