"My nets gaped wide with many a break and flaw,
Nathless I threw them as my final cast
Into the sea, and waited for the end.
When lo! a sudden glory! and I saw
From the black waters of my tortured past
The argent splendour of white limbs ascend!"
He had, in short, a religious experience, such as is known by most young men. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was disturbed, delightfully disturbed, by feeling that a religious experience was possible to him. He went on to Greece, and, remembering Plato, forgot the half-hoped, half-feared sensation of a wholly voluntary repose in Christianity.
He returned to Oxford, to win the Newdigate Prize in the next year, and to remember, with something of a girl's adventurous regret for a lover whom she has rejected, his Italian emotion. All this is written down in 'The Burden of Itys':—
"This English Thames is holier far than Rome,
Those harebells like a sudden flush of sea