‘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.
