Chapter IX: Preface (9)

To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, _Die Omnium Sanctorum_, 1835.

‘_Carissime_: After all this delay I write without being able to report progress;――but don’t be hard on me. For a long time the weather has been so very bad as to confine me entirely to the house, which has dullified me, partly by its inherent dulness, and partly by making me rather worse, to such a degree that, till the last two days, which have rather revived me, I have been up to little more than thinking in my arm-chair, or listening to a novel. Yesterday I got a drive, and to-day a ride, which I hope have done me good; and if I can go on so for a week, I shall be as well as when you went, I have no doubt; and in a diligent humour I am willing to hope…. Don’t be conceited if I tell you how much you are missed here in many quarters. Now you are gone, I clearly see that a step has been gained. Even I come in for my share of the benefit, in finding myself partially extricated from an unenviable position hitherto occupied by me: that of a prophet in his own country….

‘Before I finish this, I must enter another protest against your cursing and swearing[247] [at the end of the first _Via Media_] as you do. What good can it do?――and I call it uncharitable to an excess. How mistaken we may ourselves be on many points that are only gradually opening on us! Surely you should reserve “blasphemous,” “impious,” etc., for denial of the articles of the Faith.’

This latter passage is well known from its incorporation in the _Apologia_. Again, Hurrell resumes on the 15th:

‘You will be in a rage with me when I tell you I have not answered [Boone].[248] If I was sure of being able to think and write whenever I chose, I should not have hesitated for a moment to promise the [article] in a week or two. But this is far from my case; and I was in a particularly do-nothing way, the day I got your letter. I don’t know whether you know the sensation of a pulse above 100°? If you do, I think you will admit it not to be favourable to mental exertion. So you see I can’t count on myself, or make promises, and wish much I was not committed at all. As to the review of Blanco White, it is an amusement to me, for which I am grateful to you; but being tied up about time, correcting the proofs, etc., are my bothers. I may, indeed, be up to business-like work soon, and I hope I shall; but I am no prophet. So I have almost a mind to tell Boone that I will let it stand over till the next.’

Newman’s instant reply was reassuring:

‘… I shall write to Boone to-night to tell him that you think you could not get the article done in time for January. I will take it through the press, if you will trust me. Do not fuss yourself, or think yourself pledged….

‘Keble was thrown from his horse, and broke a small bone in his shoulder, but is better. He will not be editor of the _Tracts_….

‘M. Bunsen has pronounced upon our views, gathered from the _Arians_ (!), with singular vehemence. He says that if we succeed, we shall be introducing Popery without authority, Protestantism without liberty, Catholicism without universality, and Evangelism without spirituality. In the greater part of which censure you doubtless agree!’

The all-but-dying invalid finished the long, able, dispassionate review, entitled ‘Mr. Blanco White: Heresy and Orthodoxy,’ for the printers. It appeared in time, in _The British Critic_ for January, 1836. It ends: ‘We must now, however, leave our argument imperfect, hoping very shortly to recur to it.’ This is the colophon from Hurrell Froude. It is diligent and collected, and keeps the colours boldly flying after a fashion wholly characteristic. The manuscripts went in sections to Newman.

‘In the last five days I have written forty of the enclosed sixty-three pages. If the humour lasts, I may do the rest in a jiffy. I have spent a week with Dr. Yonge…. [He] was not satisfied with the effect of steel, and changed it for I know not what, three days ago; since when I am decidedly stronger. But the Bishop of Llandaff[249] has warned us against confounding succession with causation. If Rogers will bring my Breviary, I shall be obliged. I shall be delighted if Mozley comes with him. They will meet Wilson, though but for a day.’

The Breviary is the celebrated identical book, first studied under Blanco White’s direction, the history of which is briefly given in the _Apologia_, and which is, to Dr. Abbott, so important an agent in determining Newman’s after-career. It may be assumed that Mr. Rogers forgot to take it, that Christmastide, to Dartington, as it was on the shelves of Hurrell’s rooms at Oriel when he died, and when Archdeacon Froude asked Newman to choose a keepsake there. It is still at the Oratory in Edgbaston.

A long letter to Newman from the Rev. R. F. Wilson, on Dec. 19, contained, incidentally, no very cheery news of their friend, succumbing to consumption of the throat.

‘It was a great pleasure to me to meet poor Froude, though he looks sadly, and without any abatement of those symptoms which must make his friends most anxious about him, appears weaker [by] a great deal than when he was in Oxford. To me, he was a more interesting person than ever, because I find that his peculiar way of thinking, and manner of expressing himself, which I thought might only belong to him in health and strength, continue just the same. I saw also Rogers there, for a day.’

Froude himself ‘continues just the same,’ on paper. He was busily hoisting sail in the offing, and quite calm about it. ‘I don’t know that it does one any harm,’ he had written eighteen months before, ‘to have the impression brought seriously before one that one is not to see out the changes which seem to be at hand.’

He keeps on rallying Newman in his old animated strain, on Dec. 21, winning the quick official contradiction: ‘As to our being out of joint here! No, no; we are doing well.’

‘By Rogers’ account, things don’t go exactly as they ought at Oxford. Golius[250] has rebelled, he says; and Ben Harrison[251] has jibbed; and the Theological meetings go flat; and old Mozley[252] won’t work. Harpsfield is the writer on the Breviary services whose name I could not remember. Rogers says that Sancta Clara is rich. Wilson,[253] for your comfort, is much less tender in the finger’s end than he was last spring, though I hear Keble does complain of his being rather soft. I very much wish to hear of your putting into execution your plan of a campaign in London, and enlarging the basis of operations.

‘… When you write, tell me if you think there was any of the “nasty irony”[254] you used to complain of? I tried to avoid it…. I am entirely confined to the house, which we succeed in keeping very warm, though out-of-doors it is a sharp windy frost.’

Frederic Rogers wrote to Newman from Dartington, where, according to Newman’s arrangement, he was spending Christmas with Hurrell:

‘I am excessively amused at the alternations of treatment Miss Froude is subject to from Hurrell and Mr. B[ogue].[255] In fact, I can hardly help being in a constant half-laughter when anything is going on between Froude and his sister.’

‘Mary Froude,’ adds Newman’s annotating hand in or about 1860, ‘was one of the sweetest girls I ever saw. She was at this time engaged to Mr. B[ogue]. He used to come with a great consciousness of his situation, much gravity, and great reverence for her. Hurrell, on the other hand, treated his sister, in a good-humoured way, as a little child, calling her “Poll,” and sending her about on messages, etc., to Mr. B[ogue’s] seeming scandal and distress. Mary Froude all the while was the very picture of naturalness and simplicity, receiving with equal readiness and equability the homage of the one, and the playful rudeness of the other.’ Mr. Bogue won his bride only to lose her. Her strength had been greatly impaired by her devoted attendance on her favourite brother; nor did she long outlive him. She was the youngest of Archdeacon Froude’s three daughters. The inscription over the vault in the old beautiful churchyard next Dartington Hall, on the slope of the hill, thus includes her name:

‘Also Mary Isabella Froude, wife of the Rev. Richard Bogue, [who] died August 7, 1836, in her 22nd year.’

Shortly after the loss of his young wife, Mr. Bogue bought the patronage of Denbury from the Duke of Bedford, and enlarged the old Rectory House. He was Curate there for a good while to Archdeacon Froude.

‘The most important year in the history of the Oxford Movement was the year 1836,’[256] the Hampden year. The great fight at Arques was coming on, with ‘brave Crillon’ far away. Newman duly wished a Happy New Year to Hurrell at Dartington. Sadly welcome are such conventions, when nothing less may be said, and nothing more can be said. He sends divers comments, with a postscript: ‘T. Mozley cannot come to you. His brother is going to marry my younger sister.’[257] There was the usual prompt answer, touching on the testimonial to Wellington, then Chancellor of the University, as ‘abominable’ and _doctrinaire_; and on the 16th Mr. Rogers wrote from Bridehead, as he knew well that Newman would be anxious for personal news, as soon as might be:

‘I have left Froude, who professes to remain much as he has been, rather weaker than when you were with him, from never being in the open air, but not worse than he has been from the beginning of his confinement. I am afraid, too, he is not quite in such good spirits as he used to be. You ought to send Harrison down to him, to take lessons on the subject of the Reformers; for certainly he has a way of speaking which carries conviction in a very extraordinary way, over and above the arguments he uses. Did Froude tell you that some good lady who has read you wonders how it is that you and Arnold should have any difference between you, your sentiments and general tone so perfectly agreeing? (!)’

As the young host at Dartington had always loved the younger guest, it is natural to find the praises of the latter in Froude’s notes to Newman. Thus on Jan. 12: ‘Rogers leaves us on Thursday, having been the greatest of acquisitions, in the eyes of everyone.’ ‘The greatest of acquisitions’ of course meant an acquisition to the Cause: Mr. Rogers’ own worth being properly valued, and that valuation added as so much credit to local impressions of the Movement. Hurrell had no merely social triumphs in mind. He had paid Newman, as guest and passive proselytiser, the same compliment.

Again: ‘R[ogers] left us on [Thursday]. We had many arguments and proses,[258] in the former of which he was generally victorious, but in the latter I think I may boast of having succeeded. I do believe he hates the meagreness of Protestantism as much as either of us.’

One who had never spared himself scrutiny and blame could, without affectation, arraign his dying languor as ‘selfishness’ and ‘idleness.’ Poor Hurrell’s capacity for work and perseverance had always been on the heroic scale. ‘These are not times,’ he had written in 1831, ‘in which people who think their own principles right have any business to be shilly-shally … [but] times when it seems almost a sin to be jolly.’ Newman knew how to cheer on that astounding energy, though with an aching heart.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Jan. 7, 1836.

‘I am quite ashamed to think how long it is since I got your last letter; but illness makes one selfish, at least mine does, and dislike of writing, or in fact of doing anything, except trying to keep myself as comfortable as possible, has become a ruling passion. Since autumn set in I have done actually nothing except that review of B. White, which N[ewman] committed me about in such a way that I could not back out, and so was forced to go forward whether I would or not. However, I hope to turn over a new leaf as the weather mends, and indeed I begin to feel its reviving influence already. It is now more than two months since I have been out of doors, except in a close carriage, and for the last three weeks I have not been out at all, but have lived in an artificial summer at about the temperature of sixty-five degrees…. I am also prohibited altogether from eating meat, poultry, etc., or any animal food except fish, which, considering that milk does not agree with me, makes my case rather a hard one. On the whole, however, I am very comfortable, if it was not for an occasional twinge of conscience at my total idleness, for which I fear I really have no excuse, as I did not find myself a bit worse when obliged for a week to work as hard as I could for _The British Critic_. N[ewman] is now trying to hook me in for something else in the same line, and though I doubt not I shall be provoked with myself for having agreed to it, when the time for delivering the MS. draws near, yet I really think that the stimulus is a good thing for me. I am really very much obliged to you for your compliments about Becket,[259] for they really are the only ones I get in any quarter.’

There was no longer the least hope for a patient who had inherited consumption; who had never taken care of himself; whom no change of climate had ever benefited; whose long austerities had done, no doubt, their share of the work. As it was, he had entered his thirty-third year, outliving several of his family. But the treatment to which he was subjected seems radically wrong to those who glory in hygienic science revolutionised since his day. The hot climate, the low diet, the extra clothing while in England, the atrocious dumb-bell exercise, instead of a gentle and uniform strengthening of every muscle in the body, and last of all, the deprivation of fresh air, his one possible alleviation, were so many superfluous death-wounds in the fight. Mr. Keble, like Mr. Rogers and Newman, deplored the shut windows at Dartington, remembering their friend’s lifelong predilection for the open. ‘I am sorry to find they think it necessary to confine him so,’ he sighs to Newman. And then he adds, with a whipped-up miscellaneous optimism: ‘His being able to write is an excellent sign. What have you set him on now?… Thank you for sending me Wilson’s letter: it shows him in a most amiable light. You have all of you made much more than I meant out of that little word of mine of his being “softish.” I only meant that he was not as disposed to hang all Whigs, Puritans, etc., as some might be; but this we charitably attribute to the bad company he has kept in London.’

From Oriel Hurrell had, every few days, a full journal of the party’s doings, interspersed with all manner of private and autobiographical references. Newman, dining with a celebrated Evangelical (Mr., afterwards Sir James Stephen), sketches in the latter’s instructive conversation. ‘It is so hard to [repeat] without seeming to bepraise myself; but since I am conscious I have got all my best things from Keble and you, I feel, ever, something of an awkward guilt when I am lauded for my discoveries. He did not like my _Arians_, which, if I understood him, jumped about from one subject to another, and was hastily written, though thought out carefully…. He seemed to treat with utter scorn the notion that we were favouring Popery: this age of Mammon and this shrewd-minded nation were in no danger of it…. Further, the most subtle enemy which Christianity has ever had was Benthamism. Now he thought our views had in them that which could grapple with it…. He wanted from me a new philosophy…. Indeed, go where I will, “the fields are ready for harvest,” and none to reap them. If I might choose my place in the Church, I would, as far as I can see, be Master of the Temple. I am sure, from what little I have seen of the young lawyers, I could do something with them. You and Keble are the philosophers, and I the rhetorician’ … the fascinating miscellany of a letter goes on. And another quickly follows, when the writer (who had been named to Lord Melbourne as well as Keble) fears that Keble will refuse the Divinity Professorship at Oxford if it be proffered him, and flies to Froude as to one who can help to prevent that calamity. ‘I dread lest he should decline it. I write to you, that if you agree with me, you may write to him at once. For myself, I should go by your judgement, if such a thing occurred to me…. _Carissime_, I think I may say with a clear conscience I have no desire for it, and, had I my choice, would decide that the offer should not be made to me. I am too indolent, and like my own way too well, to wish it. I should be entangled in routine business, which I abhor. I should be obliged to economise,[260] and play the humbug, in a way I should detest, and I have no love for the nuisance of house and furniture, adding up bills, settling accounts, hiring servants, and getting up the price of butcher’s meat. I have the unpopularity, the fame, of being a party man, [with] the care of Tracts and the engagements of agitation. I am more useful as I am; but Keble is a light too spiritual and subtle to be seen unless put upon a candlestick.’ There is a most affectionate ending to his letter sent to the post on Candlemas Day. ‘Θάρσει, φίλον ἦτορ You could not but get weaker this weather, so confined.’

Meanwhile Hurrell had written ‘the last letter he wrote to me, perhaps the last letter he wrote at all.’ It is dated Jan. 27, 1836; the flow of it, the wonted pace, is gallant as usual, though it held both serious criticism and sad news. ‘You may perhaps have seen in the papers,’ he says to Newman, that my grandmother died, the 14th of this month. She retained her faculties to the last, and seems to have undergone the minimum of suffering which death requires. She was within a month or two of eighty-nine.’ This was his father’s mother, Phillis Hurrell.

‘It is very encouraging about the Oxford Tracts, but I wish I could prevail on you, when the second edition comes out, to cancel or materially alter several. The other day accidentally put in my way the Tract on “The Apostolical Succession in the English Church”; and it really does seem so very unfair, that I wonder you could, even in the extremity of οἰκονομία and φενακισμὸς have consented to be a party to it.[261] The Patriarchate of Constantinople, as everyone knows, was not one “from the first,” but neighbouring Churches voluntarily submitted to it, in the first instance, and then by virtue of their oaths remained its ecclesiastical subjects; and the same argument by which you justify England and Ireland would justify all those Churches in setting up any day for themselves. The obvious meaning of the canon [of Ephesus] is that Patriarchs might not _begin_ to exercise authority in Churches _hitherto_ independent, without their consent.

‘Christie tells me you have had a letter from poor Blanco White, pleased rather than otherwise with [my] review,[262] and mistaking it for yours, and sending you a copy of the book. Poor fellow: I should much like to know in what tone he wrote; it must have been a painful thing answering him…. I don’t gain flesh, in spite of all the milk. Indeed, I suspect that in the last six weeks I have lost a good deal, but the symptoms remain the same.’ It is in this letter that Froude arranges for the continued dedication of the accumulated dues from his own Fellowship to the propagation of the Cause dear to his heart. ‘So spend away, my boy,’ he calls cheerfully to Newman, ‘and make a great fuss, as if your money flowed in from a variety of sources!’ It was his valediction.

Archdeacon Froude, early in February, leaves a blank on the last page of his communication to Newman, ‘for your regular correspondent to fill.’ Then comes the ominous postscript: ‘Hurrell wishes me to say that he has nothing particular to say just now, but that you shall hear from him in three or four days. He has received your two letters. And now (as he will not ask to see what I may write), I will tell you in a few words that my fears for him have increased considerably within the last week. There can be now no doubt that he has been losing ground, that he is much thinner than when Mr. Rogers left us, and as evidently weaker…. He is generally cheerful, sleeps well, and takes a sufficient quantity of food.’

Newman’s thirty-fifth birthday came on February 21, and upon that day, absorbed as he now became in fighting Hampdenism, he penned a loving letter of ‘long, long thoughts’ to his favourite sister Jemima, betrothed to John Mozley. ‘Thank my Mother and Harriet for their congratulations upon this day. They will be deserved, if God gives me grace to fulfil the purposes for which He has led me on hitherto in a wonderful way. I think I am conscious to myself that, whatever are my faults, I wish to live and die to His glory; to surrender wholly to Him as His instrument, to whatever work, and at whatever personal sacrifice, (though I cannot duly realise my own words when I say so). He is teaching me, it would seem, to depend on Him only; for, as perhaps Rogers told you, I am soon to lose dear Froude: which, looking forward to the next twenty-five years of my life, and its probable occupations, is the greatest loss I could have. I shall be truly widowed; yet I hope to bear it lightly.’

At intervals of five days, Archdeacon Froude gave Newman his melancholy bulletin. Nowhere is he more admirable than in facing the impending loss of the son who had come to be his pride and glory, and his bosom friend. Says the Rev. Thomas Mozley: ‘There was a sort of stoicism about Archdeacon Froude’s character which sometimes surprised those who had only seen him for a day or two, conversing, or sketching, or sight-seeing. He once rather shocked his clergy by delivering a Charge while a very dear daughter was lying dead in his house: but there was a romantic conception of duty in the act which affords some key to Richard Hurrell’s character.’

Feb. 18, 1836.

‘My dear Hurrell desires me to account to you for his long silence, but … I am sure you must have attributed it to the real cause, and be prepared for a confirmation of the fears I then expressed…. All hope of his recovery is gone; but we have the comfort of seeing him quite free from pain, and in sure trust that the change will be a happy one whenever it shall please God to take him. His thoughts continually turn to Oxford, to yourself, and Mr. Keble; but my heart is too full to add more than his instructions to thank you for all you have written to him, and to say how much he was interested in Mr. Rogers’ most amusing account of the late proceedings in the University.’

Feb. 23, 1836.

‘Your friend is still alive. The morning after I wrote my last, he awoke with a fluttering about the heart and a pulsation at the wrist I could not count. Our apothecary thought he could not live out the day; but our doctor holds out no hope of any change having taken place that should raise our expectations beyond that of a short respite. As he continues free from pain, or any very uncomfortable sensation except that of extreme weakness … I am thankful that he is permitted to remain with us, even for a few days. On no account, my dear Mr. Newman, would I have you come down: no good could come of it. You shall hear again from me in a few days; sooner, if anything occurs that should call for an earlier communication. Hurrell desires me to thank you, and also to say that he is “sorry that he has given you any trouble about those stupid accounts,” to use his own words, and that he “cannot scrape up ideas and strength enough” to write to you himself. Should he, (contrary to all reasonable grounds for hope), get a little about again, do tell Mr. Williams [that] his paying us a short visit will give us great pleasure indeed.’

Feb. 28, 1836.

‘My dear son died this day. Since my last he has been gradually but quietly sinking. After a rather more than usually restless night, he spoke of himself as being quite comfortable this morning, and appeared to hear the Service of the day, and a sermon, read to him with so much attention that I did not think the sad event so near as it has been. About two o’clock, as I was recommending him to take some egg and wine, I observed a difficulty in his breathing. He attempted to speak; and then after a few slight struggles, his sufferings were at an end.’

He was laid to rest on March 3, beside his mother, brother, and sister, close to the Church porch. The burial service was read by the Rev. Anthony Buller, a Devonian and an Oriel man, an old friend who dearly loved him. Apparently neither Newman nor Keble travelled down for the day to Dartington Parsonage, though the former, at least, had arranged to do so from London. But the Archdeacon’s tidings were sent to Oxford, and it was only on the morning of March 1 that Newman learned of his loss. It quite overcame him. ‘He opened the letter in my room,’ writes Thomas Mozley to his sister, ‘and could only put it into my hand, with no remark. He afterwards, Henry Wilberforce told me, lamented with tears (not a common thing for him), that he could not [have seen] Froude just to tell him how much he felt that he had owed to him in the clearing and strengthening of his views.’ Keble, too, at the Hursley Altar, the Sunday after Hurrell’s home-going, which must have been his own first Sunday there as Vicar, broke down completely, and for some minutes could not go on. At Oriel (to overhear again the Rev. T. Mozley addressing his brother John): ‘Froude’s death seems not a gloom, but a calm sadness over the College. Newman showed me his father’s letter written the same day, perfectly quiet and manly, making various arrangements, and telling Newman and his [other] friends to make selections from Froude’s scanty collection of books, to keep for his sake. I suppose Froude never got a book or anything else, in his life, merely for the sake of having it. His absolute indifference to possession was something marvellous. Did I ever tell you that for two years, at least, he has given his Fellowship to Newman, to go towards the _Tracts_? Yet he was by no means careless about money matters; for he with great pains put the accounts of Junior Treasurer (which I find troublesome enough even now), on an entirely new and simpler plan, to the great convenience of his successor…. I dare say there is no one who has said more severe and cutting things to me, yet the constant impression Froude has always left on my mind is that of kindness and _sweetness_.’ This testimony, indeed, was general.

On March 2, Newman wrote to his old friend J. W. Bowden, from Oxford:

‘Yesterday morning brought me the news of Froude’s death; and if I could collect my thoughts at this moment, I would say something to you about him; but I scarcely can. He has been so very dear to me, that it is an effort to me to reflect on my own thoughts about him. I can never have a greater loss, looking on for the whole of my life, for he was to me, and he was likely to be ever, in the same degree of continual familiarity which I enjoyed with yourself in our undergraduate days…. It would have been a great satisfaction to me had you known him. You once saw him, indeed; but it was when his health was gone, and when you could have no idea of him. It is very mysterious that anyone so remarkably and variously gifted, and with talents so fitted for these times, should be removed. I never, on the whole, fell in with so gifted a person. In variety and perfection of gifts I think he far exceeded even Keble. For myself, I cannot describe what I owe to him as regards the intellectual principles of religion and morals. It is useless to go on to speak of him: it has pleased God to take him, in mercy to him, but by a very heavy visitation to all who were intimate with him. Yet everything was so bright and beautiful[263] about him, that to think of him must always be a comfort. The sad feeling I have is that one cannot retain in one’s memory all one wishes to keep there; and that as year passes after year, the image of him will be fainter and fainter.’

The long-memoried man who uttered that was only too conscious that he had no portrait of his departed friend.

On the 6th, turning aside from other things, Newman says, in his thrilling undertone, to Keble:

‘… We have indeed had an irreparable loss; but I have for years expected it. I would fain be his heir. When I was with him in October, I so wished to drink out his thoughts, but found they would not flow except in orderly course, as all God’s gifts. It was an idea of Bowden’s, the other day, that as time goes on, and more and more Saints are gathered in, fewer are needed on earth: the City of God has surer and deeper foundations, day by day.’

Some thought of kindred wing crossed at the same time the mind of Charlotte Keble at Hursley. ‘I shall be very glad,’ she says, feelingly, to her sister-in-law Elizabeth on March 9, ‘for poor Mr. Newman to have the comfort of John’s being in Oxford. He seems very much to need it; and nobody, I suppose, can so entirely sympathise with him, both in his distress for the loss, and also in the views and opinions which knit them all three together. I can’t help thinking (at least, one doesn’t know), but that Mr. Froude may in some way or other be of more service now than if he had been kept here longer.’[264]

Perhaps no apology need be made for dwelling on the impression left by Hurrell Froude on the minds of his comrades, above all, on the mind of his best-loved comrade, after he had passed away. This afterglow, this ‘trailing cloud of glory,’ is biographic comment indeed. He had lived so detached a life that it is pleasant to associate him, at the last, with the _schwärmerei_ of much tender common human sorrow, with sorrow sure of his own immortal continued interest in all that he had worked for in England: for it helps to show him less as an elf and a ‘kinless loon,’ than as the Saint-errant which, through his thirty-two years, he was.

The heavy blow of his mother’s unexpected death fell on Newman in May. The association of this loss with the sharp foregoing one, and the remembrance of Froude, whom he had known and lived with so happily since they first became colleagues at Oriel, are palpable enough in the brave sigh of that greatly religious soul, breathed in a letter to Harriett Newman, dated June 21, 1836:

‘You have nothing to be uneasy at, so far as I am concerned. Thank God, my spirits have not sunk, nor will they, I trust. I have been full of work, and that keeps me generally free from dejection. If it ever comes, it is never of long continuance, and is even not unwelcome. I am speaking of dejection from solitude. I never feel so near Heaven as then. Years ago, from 1822 to 1826, I used to be very much by myself, and in anxieties of various kinds which were very harassing. I then, on the whole, had no friend near me, no one to whom I opened my mind fully, or who could sympathise with me. I am but returning, at worst, to that state … and after all, this life is very short, and it is a better thing to be pursuing what seems God’s Will than to be looking after one’s own comfort. I am learning more than hitherto to live in the presence of the dead: this is a gain which strange faces cannot take away.’

Less than a year later, a similar strain comes like a music of triumph over sorrow in such a letter to Frederic Rogers, on the death of his sister, as none but Newman could write:

‘This is only a fresh instance of what I suppose one must make up one’s mind to think, and what is consoling to think, that those who are early taken away are the fittest to be taken, and that it is a privilege so to be taken, and that they are in their proper place when taken. Surely God would not separate from us such, except it were best both for them and for us; and that those who are taken away are such as are most acceptable to Him seems proved by what we see: for scarcely do you hear of some especial instance of religious excellence, but you have also cause of apprehension how long such a one is to continue here…. We pray daily: “Thy Kingdom come”: if we understand our words, we mean it as a privilege to leave the world, and we must not wonder that God grants the privilege to some of those who pray for it, … pray for our eventual re-gathering, but our dispersion in the interval. The more we live in the world that is not seen, the more shall we feel that the removal of friends into that unseen world is a bringing them near to us, not a separation. Our Saviour’s going brought Him nearer, though invisibly, in the Spirit.’ It is all reticent and impersonal, but it rises, before his great battle begins, from Newman’s stricken lonely heart. ‘Thou doomed to die,’ as he had said, long before, in his poem, ‘David and Jonathan’:

‘Thou doomed to die: he on us to impress
The portent of a blood-stained holiness.’

Last of all, come from his half-unwilling hand the lines well-known to students of sacred verse.

‘Dearest! he longs to speak, as I to know:
And yet we both refrain.’

What beauty is in that word ‘refrain,’ a filament of English feeling kept between the quick and the dead! It occurs in a little afterthought of a stanza, which was the only poetic offering of Newman’s pen to Hurrell Froude gone.[265] Never was there so imponderable an obituary; nor ever any more exquisitely in keeping.

For ‘the rest’ was indeed ‘silence.’ A proposal for a monument in S. Mary’s at Oxford, affectionately brought forward by Robert Wilberforce, as due to ‘our incomparable friend,’ ‘that invaluable friend,’ somehow fell through. A special paper for _The British Magazine_ fell through too, neither Newman nor Keble being able, in his first grief, to write it to his own satisfaction. The only actual notice of Froude’s decease occurred in a bare alphabetical list printed in the April number, 1836. ‘Tributes of Respect’ were usual in the Magazine, but he had none. The _Annual Biographer and Obituary_, published by the Longmans in 1837, does not include him. Nor had he any epitaph, not even when Archdeacon Froude died twenty-three years later, until Dartington Church was taken down, being thought too remote from the village population, in 1878, and the stones used in a re-erection close to the highway below; then the vault was railed in, where it was left in the lonely grassy space, with only the ancient Hall, the grey ivied tower, and the sun-dial for solemn neighbours, and the name and dates of each of the Froude family were cut on the plain slab. They are unaccompanied even by a text, or a Christian symbol. And thus, in the abstention which was his lifelong garment, Hurrell sleeps. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth, March 25, 1903, a great garland of leaves and simple Devon blossoms lay there, with a dedicatory good word from his favourite Book of Daniel: ‘O man greatly beloved! peace be unto thee: fear not; be strong, yea, be strong…. But go thou thy way till the end be; for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.’ It cannot be for ever that ‘Froude of the Movement’ shall lack a less perishable memorial.

In 1836, the ‘vanishing of such a spirit without sign’ was not to be endured. It was the most natural thing in the world that all he had written should be gathered together, that such a lover of books (as Leigh Hunt says somewhere, in one of his happy literary retrospects), should himself become a book. Hurrell became a singular book, as it happened, made up, paradoxically, of matter never prepared by himself for publication; and he and it were put forth as a party manifesto. It may not be uninteresting to review the origin and character of _The Remains of the late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, M.A., Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford_, printed by the Rivingtons in 1838 and 1839, and consisting of four volumes octavo. The Editors, whose names do not appear upon the title-page, were the Rev. John Keble and the Rev. John Henry Newman. The latter is generally supposed to have done most of the work; there are published letters of Keble’s to Sir John Coleridge, and of Newman’s to Mr. Frederic Rogers, which go to show that the idea of bringing out the _Remains_, and the initiatory labour, including the first Preface, were Newman’s. But according to Coleridge’s _Memoir_, Mr. Keble, as collaborator, wrote by far the greater part of both Prefaces. For the very beautiful second one he was certainly responsible.[266]

Of Part I. of these _Remains_, Vol. i. is devoted to a Private Journal; Memoranda personal and philosophical; Letters to Friends; one Latin and five English poems; seven pages of remembered miscellaneous sayings; and a diary as Appendix. The companion volume is devoted to Sermons complete and fragmentary; three Essays on subjects connected with arts and sciences, and three on subjects purely ecclesiastical.