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.”’