‘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