Chapter II: Preface (2)

――‘I have just been reading over my account of the time I spent at home last summer…. The great root of all my complicated misdeeds seems to have been (1) A want of proper notions respecting my relations to my father. (2) A notion that I was a competent judge how to make other people happy, by giving a tone to their pursuits. (3) A craving after the pleasures which I admire. (4) Arrogant pretensions to superiority. (5) A wish to make my conduct seem consistent to myself and others. The first is the main point, and when I have carried that, the rest will all go easily. The only way we can ever be comfortable is by our all uniting to make his will our law, and what little I can do towards this will be better accomplished by example than by presumptuous advice…. Nor do I see how I can so well repress my arrogance as by always keeping in mind that I am in the presence of one who is to me the type of the Most High.’

(To KEBLE.)

――‘Among the other lights which have been gradually dawning on me, one from following the guidance of which I hope I may derive great comfort, has made me conscious of the debt of reverence that I owe my father: not only in that, bearing his sacred name, he is proposed to me as a type of the Almighty upon earth, but that he has, in his high character, so demeaned himself as to become a fortress and rock of defence to all those who are blessed with his protection. Under his shadow I will, by God’s blessing, rest in peace, and will endeavour for the future to esteem his approbation as the highest earthly honour and his love as the highest reward. I feel in this resolution real peace; and while I am conscious of endeavouring to act up to it, will try, as you advise me, to quiet my gloomy apprehensions.’

――‘O my God! I dare no longer offer to Thee my diseased petitions in the words by which wise and holy men have shaped their intercourse between earth and Heaven. Suffer me, with whose vileness they can have had no fellowship, to frame for myself my isolated supplication. O my Father, by Thy power I began to be, and by Thy protection Thou hast continued to me my misused existence: yet I have forsaken Thee, my only Strength, and forgotten Thee, my only Wisdom. I have neglected to obey Thy voice, and gone a-whoring after my own inventions. As soon as I was born, I went astray and spake lies. I loved the delights which Thou hast given me more than Thee who gavest them; and I dreaded the might which Thou hast delegated to man more than Thee the Almighty…. Yet, praised be Thy holy Name, Thou hast not even thus utterly left me destitute; but with hideous dreams Thou hast affrighted me; and with perpetual mortifications Thou hast disquieted me; and with the recollections of bright things fascinated me; and with a holy friend Thou hast visited me. Thou hast sought Thy servant while astray in the wilderness; Thou hast shown me the horrible pit, the mire and clay in which I am wallowing: O mayest Thou, of Thy great goodness, set my feet upon a rock, and order my goings. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Turn Thy face from my sins, and put out all my misdeeds. Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. O give me the comfort of Thy help again, and stablish me with Thy free Spirit…. Bless, O Lord, with Thy constant favour and protection that high spirit whom, as Thy type upon this earth, Thou hast interposed between me and the evils I have merited. Fill him, O Lord, with the fulness of Thy grace, that, running with patience the race which has been set before him, he may finish his course at Thy good time with joyfulness, and find a rest from his labours in the portion of the righteous.’

――‘I will be cautious about talking of myself and my feelings: what I like; whom I admire; what are my notions of a high character; how few people I find to sympathise with me on any subject; and many other egotistical, mawkish, useless matters, about which I have suffered myself to prate. Also, I will avoid obtruding my advice, and taking high grounds to which I have no pretensions.’

――‘Just now, at breakfast,[19] I felt the inconvenience of not omitting an oath in a story I told of Sheridan. I felt directly that I lost ground, and should be unable to make a stand, if conversation were to take a turn I disliked. I must be watchful and strict with myself in this respect: for, if I comply with my father’s wishes, and enter freely into society, I shall have much harder work to fight off my old shuffling vanity, and shall be drawn, from not feeling my own ground, into foolishness and flash, and everything that is disgusting.’

――‘I used to speculate on the delight of keeping fasts upon the river in fine weather, among beautiful scenery, rather than in my dull rooms at Oxford; but last Friday was a real fine day, yet I did not at all turn it to this account. Though I ate little, it was something very different from my Oxford fasts, and still more so from what I then used to picture to myself, when I should get home. I waste time in preparing boats, and thoughts in speculating on schemes for expeditions, and for improving our appointments. Also, I observe other bad effects resulting from my misconduct, which I cannot but regard as signs that good spirits are deserting me. The other evening I had an argument with my father, almost in a sort of tone which I used to feel ashamed of last summer, and which, in the Christmas vacation, I think I was not even tempted to; and when I caught myself getting untuned, it cost me a [severe[20]] effort to check myself; nor was it till the next morning that all the effects of it subsided, and I felt quite good-natured and humble again. In this fight I was greatly helped by the experience of former conflicts, and recollecting the ways I had caught myself in self-deceit, so that it gives me some hope as well as humiliation. I pray God that He will not suffer all my feeble efforts to be wasted, and prove quite ineffectual, and that He will enable me to lie down to-night with a better conscience.’

――‘Just now, in riding home from Denbury,[21] I got arguing with my father about the little chance anyone has of doing good, in a way rather inconsistent with our relative condition; yet, when I thought I was going rather too far, could hardly convince myself that, at any particular moment, it was incumbent on me to stop. It is this self-deceiving disposition that I am afraid of.’

――‘I will brace myself and keep my attention on the alert on this S[alcombe?] expedition, by a vow about my food: I will make my meals as simple as I can, without being observed upon; will take no command upon myself, but obey my father’s instructions to the utmost of my power; will try to make no objections or propositions unless called upon; and that no one may be able to put me out of the way [of self-denial] everyone shall have theirs, however disagreeable they may seem to me.’

――‘We returned to-day, and on reading over these resolutions, which I called a vow, I find I have acted very poorly up to them. I believe they have operated as a sort of check upon me in some respects, that I have been less of an epicure and less of an interferer than I should have been else. But yet, quite at starting, I suggested, when my father proposed going ashore, that it would take a longer time than he calculated on: but this was merely a suggestion. And on one of the evenings when we were by ourselves, I argued about people going to Church in a way very inconsistent with our relative situations; neither was I quite cordial in my acquiescence with propositions of my father’s about minor excursions at S[alcombe?] and feel as if I had pressed unpleasantly on him some of my opinions about tides, and names of places.’

――‘Yesterday, I was talking to [Phill?] about [Peg?[22]]; and among other things, when I said how considerate she was about everybody’s wants, and how she was always on the lookout for an opportunity to relieve them, I said (and have reason enough to say it) that things of that sort did not come into my head. But I am afraid I must confess that I was a little annoyed at [Phill? allowing] that she did not think they did! I cannot accuse myself of having been so insincere as to have laid a trap for a compliment; but I was not quite prepared to find that my negligence was such as to obtrude itself on the observation of those who would always make the best of one. O God! give me grace to look on this as a warning voice from Thee, and let the remembrance of it brace my energies for the future…. Also, I yesterday gave way to a covetous inconsistent wish for a beautiful colt that we happened to see, and which my father had half a mind I should get for my own. I feel all these selfish wishes crowding on me, and have no clear decided rule by which to check them. I think I will always ask myself, when I wish for an elegant superfluity, what business I have to be so much better off than my sisters, and will not allow myself anything I can avoid till I have got them all the things they are reasonably in want of.’

――‘Teach me to be ever mindful of the wants and wishes of others, and that I may never omit an opportunity of adding to their happiness; let each particular of their condition be present with me, what they are doing or suffering. I am most fearfully deficient in this mark of a child of God. Protect me from all covetous desires of the pleasant things which money can procure: the D[enbury?] cottage, the new dining-room window, nice furniture, equipage, musical instruments, or any other thing, in order to obtain which I must lessen my means of benefiting others.

――‘I have done many things to-day that I ought to be ashamed of. For instance: I said to the [Provost?] I had not examined carefully an analysis that I had hardly read a word of. I have assumed, too, a harsh manner in examining. I feel too anxious to show my own knowledge of the subjects on which I am examining. Was very inattentive at morning Chapel, and not sorry to find that there was none in the evening. I believe the day before yesterday I made a bungle in examining W[illy] in Euclid, which made him appear to be doing wrong while he was quite right, but did not discover it in time to rectify it by confession (which I hope I should have done).’

The youth who wrote much else thus singularly and severely of himself, had an almost fierce sincerity. At an early hour, he made up his mind to be in his strength, what many men are said to be in their weakness, ‘nobody’s enemy but his own,’ and he carried out both clauses implied in the contract. Neither at Eton nor at Oxford, with opportunities by the score, did he ever make a single ‘influential’ personal friend; to no position or emolument did he ever aspire, though he was to give unremitting and precious labour to what he believed to be the best cause in the world. ‘Froude and I were nobodies,’ said Newman, two lifetimes later, with a touch of whimsical pride. Like a child of Socrates, our philosopher would fain see how many things there are which he could do without; like a child of Seneca, he would fain enjoy this life, with the zest possible to those alone who are always ready to leave it. Enough of this Journal, most practical in all its self-searching. It appears to concern itself with trivialities only to those who do not realise how relentless is the ascetic spirit, and how small a quarry it will still hunt when all the tigers are met and exterminated. As was said of a greater than Hurrell Froude: ‘_Ce diable d’homme a toujours été en se perfectionnant. Il serait devenu honnête homme, si on l’eut laissé vivre._’

When Mr. Keble went down to his curacy at Southrop, at the beginning of the Long Vacation of 1823,[23] Hurrell went with him to read for his B.A. degree, which he took in December of that year. The summer was to him, as to one of his companions there, Isaac Williams, the turning-point in his career. In those tranquil fields and winding roads and the solemn little village Church, where he found ‘a man wholly made up of love, and religion a reality,’ Hurrell began to see the Last Things: he never could forget the place, the person, and the occasion which meant so much to him in the Providence of God. His third companion, Robert Wilberforce, ‘did not feel towards Keble,’ wrote Isaac Williams, ‘as we did at that time, having been brought up in an opposite school.’ In all the fresh and brave happinesses of nature and of grace which were round Keble like an aureole wherever he went, Hurrell brightened and strengthened visibly.

‘You are my Spring: and when you smile, I grow.’

He learned from him to follow conscience and to fear applause. As soon as he parted from Mr. Keble, their long correspondence began, and the home-loving pupil was proud indeed when the ‘first man in Oxford,’ as Newman enthusiastically called him, came on a visit to Dartington. We know from recent testimony of a delightful pen[24] how dear the neighbourhood became to Mr. Keble, and how often he would wander away from the animated household of his friends to the fourteenth-century priest’s-house hard by at Little Hempston, an almost unique survival, with its small quadrangle, its hall and solar, of Chaucer’s time. The lovely old Vicarage, in its still secluded situation, had taken captive Hurrell’s twenty-year old fancy, as a letter of 1823 to Mr. Keble shows.

‘I will pledge my own peculiar veracity to the following statement: The situation is, I am confident (and on this matter experience has peculiarly qualified me to judge), [by] far the most beautiful place in the world, the focus of irradiated perfection, the favoured haunt of romance and sentiment, the very place which, if you recollect the circumstance, you taxed me with a disposition to romanticity for encomiasing, when I informed you that I had destined it for my κρησφύγετον, where, unmolested, _flumina amem silvasque inglorius_. The Parsonage is situated in a steep and narrowish glen, which intersects a long line of coppice that overhangs the Dart for the length of nearly a mile, and rises almost perpendicularly out of the river to the height of about two hundred feet. The stream there is still, clear, and very deep; on the opposite side is Dartington; and a line of narrow, long, flat meadows, interspersed with large oak and ash trees, forms the bank of the river. The steep woods on the Little Hempston side are in the form of a concave crescent (thereby agreeing with Buckland).[25] From the Parsonage to the river is a steep descent through a small orchard; at the bottom of which, on turning the corner which the glen aforesaid makes on its north side with the course of the stream, you come at once on a sort of excavation, of about half an acre, which, terminated by an overhanging rock, forms a break in the line of coppice aforesaid. In this said rock young M. found the hawks’ nests. I think they build there every year. On the opposite side, _i.e._ the Dartington side, is what was formerly a little island, but now no longer claims that proud title, in the oaks of which I am in hopes we shall soon have an heronry, as they haunt there all the summer. After this I should not so utterly despair of success, if I felt less interested in the event;[26] but as it is, I can hardly hope for so great a gratification.’

Several months later, he is still in the descriptive vein.

‘When I came home I found things looking most dismal. My father had cut all the laurels to the roots, in hopes of making them come up thicker. A field almost outside the windows, which had been put in tillage, was ploughed so extremely ill that we were afraid it would be forced to be tilled with turnips (_Dî talem campis avertite pestem!_) instead of clover…. The copse also, which overhung the river by the Little Hempston rocks, was in great part gone, “and the place thereof knew it no more.” I hope the rest may be spared.’

The laurels he had planted gave the energetic Archdeacon some trouble. In his old age he had them all swept away, and made a needed if unromantic improvement in the outlook of the beautiful old house. Hurrell’s implicit differences with his ‘knowing, quick, and handy’ father, so many of whose best qualities he shared, hinged laughably often on such things as the culture of trees and the make and management of boats. In all, he did his best to become what the epitaphs of the time call ‘an humble obsequious son.’

Hurrell took only a second class in Classics and Mathematics (disappointing and astonishing everyone who knew him) during 1824. But he had exactly the sort of mind which, sooner or later, would come to grief with any curriculum.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, March 29, 1825.

‘… Be so good as to write a sermon on “_flumina amem sylvasque inglorius_,” for the benefit of my father, who objects to our having a four-oar given us, as infallibly tending to debilitate and torpify the mental faculties! I am afraid it is not in my stars to be ever contented; for I confess I do not feel that serene felicity which I pictured to myself last October as my destiny; though my delight is not impaired as to the misery I have escaped. I am sure the ghosts of those who have taken a degree at Oxford will require a double portion of Lethe before they begin “_in corpora velle reverti_.”

‘_March 31. P.S._――I wrote enclosed the day before yesterday, but, as you will perceive, incapacitated it for going by the post without a cover; so I waited for a frank. And, as I am become so prudent as not to like wasting paper, you are indebted to this circumstance for an elongation of my epistle. I don’t recollect whether I told you that I have been reading Clarendon, for which, though I skipped over some parts, I feel much veneration. I am glad I know something of the Puritans, as it gives me a better right to hate Milton,[27] and accounts for many of the things which most disgusted me in his not-in-my-sense-of-the-word poetry. Also, I adore King Charles and Bishop Laud!… You prosed me once for not sending regards, remembrances, compliments, etc., so let everyone choose which they like best, as I commit to you an assortment of each kind for distribution.

‘“Tuque vale, sedesque juvet meminisse meorum,
Heu, nunquam rediture.”’

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, May 13, 1825.

‘Αἰνότατε: I have been long intending to thank you for your benevolent instructions, which (I don’t know whether I ought to be ashamed or not in confessing it) answered a purpose different from what they were intended for; viz., they convinced me and (what was more to the point) my father, that I knew so little about the matter, and had so little time left, that it was no use to proceed. It certainly was no small satisfaction to me to have so good an excuse for giving up what I had exhausted the entertainment of, and had nothing but the laborious to come. Also, the weather has been so very beautiful this spring, and the delicious blue sky, with hardly a cloud on it for six weeks, so very tempting, that it was hardly possible to help being idle. But somehow my conscience rather misgives me, and what with admonitions now and then from my father, and my lately having taken up with reading sermons, I am become “as melancholy as Moorditch or the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe”; so that upon the whole I think I must come to you to be prosed and put into a better way…. By the by, I am now officiating as ethical instructor to B[ob?], in which capacity I have been much humiliated at finding how little I know about the matter; but it makes me get them[28] up, which perhaps I should never have done else. I do not think them at all less prosy and long-winded than I used, and I would bet Bishop Butler against all the ‘stotles in the world. Among other things I am also becoming something of a florist, and something of an architect, in which latter I make some proficiency. I am a powerful coadjutor (though I say it that should not say it), in the completion of D[enbury], which bears a different aspect from when you saw it last. It will be a pretty monastic-looking erection, and if we could but make it old, and buy a ghost or two, would be somewhat sentimental. For, thanks to my grandmother’s[29] perverseness, she would not have a new house except in the shape of an old one repaired, which superinduced the necessity of so many crooked little passages and such an irregular exterior, that my father had an excuse for doing what would else have seemed fanciful. Talking about architecture, a new town[30] is going to be built down by Torbay, which is to cut out Brighton and every place. The ground where it is to stand is perfectly unencumbered with houses, and covered with trees, so that there is every advantage at starting; and all will be done on a general plan, so that the buildings shall as little as possible interfere with each other. If you know anyone that wishes for a delightful sea-residence, send him there. You must know you narrowly escaped having a poetical effusion from me the other day. I was out in so magnificent an evening; but being, as you know, a man of few words, I found that by the time I had made my verses scan and construe, they would be so remote from an effusion, at least in the quality of being _effunded_, that it was better to be contented with a prosaic statement: viz., that coming home from Little Hempston the other evening after sunset, and having with some difficulty discovered and scrambled into my boat, which was moored under an old stump at the bottom of the woods, as I proceeded on my course down the river, the sky gradually assumed a portentous appearance, and distant flashes of lightning, growing gradually more distinct, began at regular intervals. Things however are not so constituted as to allow the sublime to amalgamate with the comfortable: according to the decrees of Fate, the storm which had lingered in the upper regions till I had got so far on my way home as to be out of reach of shelter from Dartington House, now came down with such violence as to save me the trouble of running at any rate, by convincing me that whether I was out five minutes or fifteen I should be in an equally bad case. The thunder got very loud, and the lightning was so green and brilliant, that I could see the stiles and gates, and even their latches, like the spectres of the things from which “_nox abstulit atra colorem_.” Sometimes the flashes lasted for nearly a second, and dazzled me so that after they were passed I could make no use of the twilight at all. Having got thus far, I feel in the awkward situation of having told a story without a point, and feel inclined to resort to the usual remedy, and apply to my invention to help me out of the scrape with a marvellous conclusion. Perhaps however you may be contented with a moral: so here goes. As good never comes unalloyed with evil, so that very evil often serves to give it a relish which it might otherwise be destitute of. I could not have reckoned this as an adventure, if I had not been forced to change my clothes when I came home.’

To the same ‘holy friend’ for whom Hurrell privately says on his knees his heartfelt thanksgiving, he writes often, from the first, in a mood of bantering and almost irreverent freedom.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, 1824.

‘… Now I proceed to vindicate my character from the unwarrantable aspersions you have been pleased to throw upon it. Be it known then that since the first of May I have read the four first books of Herodotus, three of Ethics, two of Thucydides, _Œdipus Tyrannus_, _Eumenides_, Ἱκέτιδες, and a book of Homer; and all this not carelessly, but with Scapula and Matthiæ. And though there are several posing places in the Æschylus and Herodotus with which I shall in course of time bother you, still upon the whole I flatter myself that in a short space I shall be at least equal to Peter Elmsley,[31] and I would advise you to prepare the examining masters for the reception of such a luminary…. My father, I must assure you, has received no favourable impression of your moral organisation from the injudicious exposure which you made in your last letter. But I will urge the matter no further; … the shortness of the time during which your ἐνέργεαι have been discontinued may not yet have allowed the annihilation of the ἕξις. I shall rest in hope that this timely admonition may awaken you to a sense of your duty, and reinstate your perceptions of the ἀληθὲς in their full vigour. “Thine by yea and nay, which is as much as to say, as thou usest him.”’

Mr. Keble was settled in 1825 as Curate in sole charge of Hursley, Hampshire.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Aug. 16, 1825.

‘… _Suaviter ut nunc est inquam_: but it was not so with poor [Williams] in the packet, being that he was sick all the way from Portland Head to Plymouth Sound; and was so completely miserable that he would not be spoken to, and kept on groaning out that he would give all he ever expected in the world to be on shore. By this unfortunate circumstance he was prevented from seeing the sun rise over the watery element in the very act of “pillowing his chin upon an orient wave,” and from bearing testimony (which I can do) that there is nothing the least sublime in the mere fact of being out of sight of land, and having nothing but the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky. But what was most melancholy of all, he was unable to get a glimpse of all the glorious coast of the south promontory of Devonshire…. Next day we came upon Southampton, while it was under one of the most imposing magnificent effects possible: a rainbow, lost in a dark cloud which was raining as hard as it could pelt, was resting one of its ends on the woods: and the sun on the waters, and the spires, made the misty smoke that was rising up from the town, quite imposing and sentimental. However, my complacency was much alloyed by the tantalising sight of the beautiful yachts, with their glittering sails, skimming along in the breeze, which had just started up after the violent rain which had fallen, and the melancholy _Heu, non mea_ rushed on me with irresistible force.’

How well he loved a boat! He complains, in one entry of his Journal, that the thought of boats distracts him insufferably during his prayers.

Hurrell was asked to say his say about _The Christian Year_, then in manuscript. He seems to have been inclined to begrudge the fact that Keble had set himself to write not as a poet for poets, but as a challenging voice to ‘earth-drudging hearts.’ That he appreciated the lasting charm of the book is quite apparent from the singularly apposite quotation applied to it in the second letter on the subject.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Sept. 10, 1825.

‘About the poems――it is really too ludicrous for a fellow like me to sit down deliberately to criticise the taste and philosophy of a production of yours: so that I have no inclination to expose or commit myself, by detailing to you my remarks on particular passages. There are, as you may suppose, many places which, in fun, I would show fight about; and there is something which I should call Sternhold-and-Hopkinsy in the diction, of which I began to note down the first instances I met; but, finding it go through, I concluded it was done on a theory. But though I am not quite such a fool as to think my opinion worth offering in point of criticism, it may not, perhaps, be quite useless to confess it as a matter of fact, with which you may begin an induction as to the probable good you may do by publication. I confess, then, and not without some shame, that you seem to me to have addressed yourself too exclusively to plain matter-of-fact good sort of people … and not to have taken much pains to interest and guide the feelings of people who feel acutely, nor to have given much attention to that dreary visionary existence which they make themselves very uncomfortable by indulging in, and which I should have hoped it was the peculiar province of religious poetry to sober down into practical piety. I know all this may be great nonsense, may be even humbug; for long experience has convinced me how much I can cheat myself as to my real feelings. But that you may see that it has not been concocted since, but was the impression made on me while reading, I will extract a note which I made … I suppose I meant that things like Gray’s _Elegy_, which turn melancholy to its proper account, by pointing out the vanity of the world without telling us so, seem to me more to answer the purpose. And now I will cease making an ass of myself!… I am half-conscious that the same sort of objections might be made against the Psalms; and though I cannot but think that they will make your poems less generally liked and read, I am far from confident that it may not be better, upon the whole, for those who attend to them as a religious duty.

‘I can hardly shut up without telling you of such an interesting set of fellows that we heard of in our peregrinations. They were sixteen French fishermen and three boys, who had all come over, in one boat, to get bait on the English coast, and were kept there ten days by the wind: all that time they sat upon the deck knitting stockings and nightcaps; and, when Sunday came, they were just so far out at sea that the people on the coast could hear them singing the Roman Catholic service so beautifully, and in the evening they came on shore, and danced, out of mere jollity, for an hour. They were such grateful fellows, that a gentleman on the coast who had done them some kindness, could hardly get rid of them without his giving them some commission to do for him in France, _i.e._ to let them smuggle something over for him; and, when they could not remove his scruples as a Justice of [the] Peace, they caught him an immense fish, and were quite disappointed that he would not accept it as a present.’

The great mass of Keble’s letters to his pupil and friend have disappeared: but we have the answer promptly sent to this, and written with his own winning humility. ‘For your telling me exactly what you think about [the verses] I shall hold you in greater honour as long as I live.’ He goes on, sweetly and sagaciously, to explain that _The Christian Year_ but aimed at helping ‘the plain and good.’[32] It will be remembered that the archpriest of letters, Mr. William Wordsworth, once offered to go over _The Christian Year_, with a view to correcting the English. To that height Hurrell could not rise.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Dec. 6, 1825.

‘“Sir, my dear friend,” you cannot tell how much I am obliged to you for your benevolence to my last letter, but that does not make me the less a fool for having expressed myself so; and what provokes me most of all is that I did not give myself fair play by not writing till my opinions had settled; for as far as my memory goes, I think they are now undergoing a revolution, and that if I were to see the pottery[33] in question again, I should think quite differently of it. There is something about them which leaves (to use the words of our friend Tom Moore)

‘“A sad remembrance fondly kept
When all lighter thoughts are faded.”

And though I cannot account for the fact, I have been much more sensible of this since a re-perusal of Genesis.――I wrote the foregoing not long after the receipt of your letter, but have been such a dawdle that I have not been able to collect materials for finishing it: and the circumstance which now at last helps me out is a melancholy one, no other than the decease of our friend and companion Johnny Raw:[34] who was taken off, some days since, in the staggers. There was something peculiarly doleful in the poor fellow’s exit; and there was a sort of dreariness diffused over all its circumstances, which set it off with almost a theatrical effect. As B[ob] says, it would have not been so much if he had wasted away by a long illness, or if he had heard of his death at a distance; but to have been using and admiring him till within a few days of his decease, to have watched all the stages of his rapid illness, seen him bled, given him his physic (which seemed to distress him very much, though all along the pain he suffered was evidently very great), and, after all, to have got up at two o’clock in the night, when the crisis was to take place, and come into the stable only a minute after his death, where we could just see him, by lantern-light, stretched out on the straw:――were incidents not calculated to excite pleasure. Add to this, it was one of those shivering cold stormy nights which make me feel as if I and the people with me were the only human beings in the world: a fact, by-the-by, which I am not yet sufficient psychologist to account for. And the next day, when we went out to bury him, the weather was just the same, and there was nothing to excite one cheerful association. Also, it was somewhat staggering to the speculatively inclined, not to be able to discover one single reason why he should not be able to gallop about as well as ever. He was evidently in good condition, his flesh hard, and his limbs sound: and why I should be able to walk any better than he, was more than I could elicit. We buried him under an elm tree in the lawn, and nailed his shoes to it for a monument.[35]

‘… My father has found the Εἰκὼν [βασιλική] among some old books, and I have been reading it. It puts me in mind of a verse in this morning’s Psalms: “Thou shalt hide me privily by Thine own presence from the provoking of all men, Thou shalt keep me secretly in Thy tabernacle from the strife of tongues”; which seems to point out the clearest and most beautiful instance of the moral government of God being begun on earth. I should like to know the Hebrew of the verse before: “O how plentiful is Thy goodness, which Thou hast prepared for them that trust in Thee _even before the sons of men_.” For if “before” means “in the presence of,” then David is drawing the conclusion I want; but I am afraid it must mean “greater than falls to the lot of the rest of mankind.” … Please to look, when you are in a humour for it, in _Medea_, 705, where Ægeus says, εἰς τοῦτο γὰρ δὴ φροῦδος εἰμὶ πᾶς ἐγώ. The commentators cited by Elmsley have fumbled much about it, and some of them I do not understand; but may it not mean: “For as to my name continuing in my posterity, in that respect I am clean gone.” If εἰς τοῦτο will bear this signification, it is certainly prettier than as it is commonly explained. I like _Hecuba_ far better than _Medea_…. Another interval has elapsed, and the leaves, which had held out surprisingly hitherto, have almost totally disappeared, and now we may reckon winter to be fairly set in. I wish I could write verses to perform the obsequies of this delicious summer, the like of which will probably never visit the abodes of mortals again….’

The little implied joke, celibate and Greek, on his own name, is not the least adornment of this charming letter.

At the outset of 1826, Hurrell found at least one modern book to his liking. This was the _Fragments in Verse and Prose, by a Young Lady, Miss Elizabeth S――――, with Some Account of her Life and Character_, by H[enrietta] M[aria] Bowdler, a new edition of which, in two volumes octavo, had just appeared. Elizabeth Smith of Burnhall near Durham, the Oriental scholar, was born in 1776 and died in 1806. Our present standard reference, the _Dictionary of National Biography_, which highly commends her self-won learning and its methods, adds that ‘her verses have no merit, and her reflections are of the obvious kind, gracefully expressed.’ But the reflections do not seem obvious to some readers, save inasmuch as at first all simple and profound little discoveries of the sort seem so: which is ever their highest praise. The book is but poorly representative, and badly put together: it certainly would give no clear idea, to our own more exacting public, of a personality full of goodness and charm, nor of a remarkable mind with a dozen hobbies, and not one affectation.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Jan. 12, 1826.

‘Δαιμόνιε: As I am conscious of being one of those imbecile-minded people who one day admire a thing as if they could never think of anything else, and soon after cease to think of it at all, I must write to you while a little book that I took up the other day accidentally continues uppermost in my thoughts. It calls itself _Fragments in Verse and Prose, by a Young Lady_; and struck with the sentimentality of the title, I took it up to laugh at it; nor did I find anything in the preface to do away with my preconceived opinion. But on opening the book at random, among some fragments extracted from her private meditations, I began to like her most extremely. The mention of Piercefield,[36] and the initials Miss S., made me remember your having told me of a Miss Smith that lived there, while we were scrambling up the Windcliff. I am sure if you had admired her half as much as I do, you would not have let me go till we had hunted out every corner that she mentions. There is something to my mind very peculiar in all the turn of her thoughts, and those half-metaphysical, half-poetical speculations which almost put me in mind of my mother. Yesterday I mentioned the book to a person who I was surprised to find knew a great deal about her, and from whom I was still more astonished to hear that I myself knew very well indeed her intimate friend Miss H[unt], to whom most of her letters are addressed….’

And again, a little later, winding up an intimate letter in Latin to Keble, there is more of this pleasant heroine-worship, coupled with some feeling analysis and amusing self-portrayal. Hurrell’s repugnance to things German were a foregone conclusion, had he never expressed it.

‘… I could not find the places you referred me to in Miss Smith, but am happy to find that we sympathise in the extent of our admiration, if not in the sources; though indeed, I am willing to believe, both. But as for old Klopstock, I cannot read about him and his wives;[37] and am rather horrified at Miss S[mith’s] having taken so much trouble about him, or any other sentimental old German. What makes me admire Miss S[mith] so excessively, is more than I can give any intelligible account of: she either does not admire, or is not acquainted with my favourite books; and those that she fancies she admires (for I am sure she does it only in ignorance) are my inveterate enemies. Neither could I fix upon any passages in her own writings which would seem to justify me if I quoted them. But somehow I seem perfectly certain I know her intimately, and that I can trace the feelings in which all she says and does originates; and all this is so consistent, as far as it goes, with what I have imaged to myself as the archetype of human perfection, that I have invested her, in my imagination, with all its attributes….

‘Lloyd’s[38] immense catalogue of books, that he recommends as necessary, has frightened me beyond measure: but I am getting to be of your opinion, that to be fully occupied is almost necessary, in order to get through life with tolerable ease and comfort….’

Says the Editor of the Newman _Correspondence_, in entering upon the annals of the year 1826: ‘The Oriel election and Fellowship was this year a momentous one to Mr. Newman, as bringing him into intimacy with the friend whose influence he ever felt powerful beyond all others to which he had been subject.’ Newman writes of the election to his mother on March 31, 1826, in terms of convinced enthusiasm which are not unlike Crabb Robinson’s after encountering for the first time the youthful William Hazlitt. ‘By-the-bye, I have not told you the name of the other successful candidate:[39] Froude of Oriel. We were in grave deliberation till near two this morning, and then went to bed. Froude is one of the acutest and clearest and deepest men in the memory of man. I hope our election will be _in honorem Dei et sponsæ suæ ecclesiæ salutem_, as Edward II. has it in our Statutes.’ The Oriel electors had their own standards, and gloried in them. Fellowships depended hardly at all on the technical and the prescribed; indications of the scope and accuracy of acquired knowledge passed for next to nothing; but what did count, in Oriel’s golden days, was a man’s whole momentum and equilibrium, his relationship to the intellectual life, his mastery over his own faculties: ‘not what he had read, but what he was like.’ Originality, distinction, was the cachet, and Oriel College was the first in Oxford to throw open her unhampered Fellowships to the entire University. Like Whately, Thomas Mozley, and Newman himself, Froude who stood only moderately high in the books of the University examiners, had been preferred before candidates who were double-firsts. He took, as was but natural, an even more rapturous pleasure in the event than Newman had done. He wrote to Keble, when he was steadying himself under the impact of a lasting good fortune:

‘My dreamy sensations have at length subsided, and I cannot think how I could have made myself such a fool as to be so upset! But it was altogether such a surprise to me, and I knew it would delight my father so much, that I could not stand it all. I do not mean that when the news was announced to me I did not contemplate the possibility of it; for you must know that I am the most superstitious of the species, and that on the first day of the examination I had a sort of indescribable sensation from which I augured the event. But such a confused prophesying as this is so very different from a sober expectation that it served rather to increase than to diminish my surprise at its being realised.’

And again, turning from what he thought an almost unnatural success, he seeks refuge in his own special pun. ‘_Crede mihi_,’ he confides to Keble on the eve of Candlemas, ‘_idem sum ille φροῦδος qui utroque pede claudicans e scholis evasi: me in nulla re scholastica ex illo tempore usque ad hunc diem sentio profecisse_.’ In ‘Empty-head’ limping with both feet out of the Schools, we are to recognise an allusion to Hurrell’s unforgotten double-second class. He was too humble to see that for a Romany rye of his sort, a double-second class was really a quite extravagant toll to pay to University conventions.

Oriel soon became a hotbed of revolution, as the consequence of her anti-academical processes of selection. Within two years, troubles began, and Froude, with Newman, R. I. Wilberforce, and Dornford, the other public Tutors, took up and for a long time maintained, against the settled paganism of the College, their own ‘fierce’ views of their duty towards undergraduates. Of this duty Froude and Newman had a particularly clear conviction. Keble had struck, and struck strongly, the pastoral note as early as 1818, and developed it in a letter to Sir J. T. Coleridge.[40] On the other hand, the Provost and the administrators held that intercourse between Tutor and pupil should be a routine of lectures only, and not that and a cure of souls beside. The antagonism lasted for nearly four years, during which Froude’s deep friendship with Newman grew up, and was perfected. The end came with Hawkins’ express refusal to sanction the further supply of pupils to the would-be spiritual directors who so quietly defied him. They had ‘led the last struggle for the ancient quasi-parental and religious character of the College Tutor.’[41] As the pupils they had went up for degrees and left the University, they fell quite idle, in that respect, by 1831, and with all their smouldering zeal and moral fire within them, the way was open for another onset of the Laudians which was destined to affect the consciences not alone of young Oriel, but of the nation and the age.

Froude’s allotted rooms were directly over Newman’s, in the Chapel angle of the Great Quad of Oriel College. The new Fellow did not, as such, come into residence until after the Easter vacation; during the following month, April, we find him still luxuriating in Devonshire and plunging deep into abstract metaphysics. ‘I have been taken with a fit of writing,’ he confesses to Keble. ‘I am happier than I ever was at Oxford, far: but that is not saying much.’ Apparently, he had posted manuscripts for criticism, and received it as gratefully and as combatively as usual. ‘I am infinitely indebted to you,’ he writes, ‘for your expeditious attention to my concern, and will try my best to set to rights the places you row [about]. However, I still maintain that my end is both relevant and true and my puzzle-headed antithesis a good one; but I bow my head in implicit confidence, as far as practice goes. Distinctions and refinements are growing on me, and I am all in a maze; and it is delightful to have the shadow of a great rock in a weary land to which I may turn for temporary shelter. If I had a year more, I could not make it at all to my satisfaction; so I must make the best of it.’

His note-books for this year and the next are full of the contemned ‘distinctions and refinements.’ In trying to beat out his conceptions of moral growth (a thing he refused to recognise in himself), he jots down some striking and arresting thoughts. Two or three which lie metaphysically not far apart, must suffice for transcription. They show the coherence, the synthetic power with which Froude’s philosophy knit all worlds into one.

――‘For whatever cause the great Author of Nature contrived that resemblance (as it appears to us) which subsists between the part of His dominions of which He has given us a consciousness, and that other part with which we are acquainted only through our understanding, it seems calculated to assist our conceptions of the one to observe what passes in the other…. The business of our life seems to be to acquire the habit of acting as we should do if we were _conscious_ of all that we _know_…. It is delightful to see things turn out well whose case seems in some sort to represent to us our indistinct conceptions of our own. Animals fainting under the effect of exercise, and then again recovering their strength which that very exercise has contributed to increase; the slow and, uncertain degrees in which this increase is effected, and yet the certainty in which it is effected: the growth of trees sometimes tossed by winds and checked by frosts, yet, by the evil effects of these winds, directed in what quarter to strike their roots so as to secure themselves for the future, and by these frosts hardened and fitted for a new progress the next summer:――in things of this sort I am so constituted as to see brethren in affliction evidently making progress towards release.’

――‘Some people imagine that there is something blasphemous in the supposition that a finite creature can be conscious in two places at once. This is so far from being true that even our own experience contradicts it. Perhaps there is some absurdity in the very idea which attributes a place to consciousness, or the things capable of it. With regard to ourselves, there is nothing to show us _where_ we are conscious (though most people suppose the conscious thing is somewhere within the body), or that we may not be with equal propriety said to be conscious, or, in other words, to _be_, wherever anything is of which we are conscious. It seems to me that the question where we are, is one not of fact, but of degree; and that the only facts which make us suppose we are where our body is, give us likewise the same reason for supposing that in the same sense we sometimes are far away from the body.’

――‘Yesterday, before breakfast, while the vacancy produced by fasting was still on me, and I was reading the Psalms, and craving for a comprehension of the things which I could only look on as words, and was worked up to such a pitch that I felt trying to see my soul, and make out how it was fitted to receive an impression from them,――Merton bell[42] began to go; and it struck me (I cannot tell why) that if such a trifle as that could give me such a vivid idea, my soul must be a most intricate thing; and that when senses were given to the blind part of it, what things would those appear, the apprehension of which I was struggling after! This is as near what passed in my mind as I can find expressions to shape my memory by. This blindness of heart is what, by habit and patience, it is our work practically to remove. We are to shape our souls for its removal, by making it in harmony with the things invisible.’