To the Rev. John Keble, Oct. 14, 1826.
‘It will seem rather pompous to announce my determination not to rise till I have got a letter written to you; but unless I start with some such resolution, I shall not be able to get one written at all. I have made three attempts to write … but all of them ran off into something wild, which upon reflection I thought would be better kept to myself. The fact is, that I have been in a very strange way all the summer, and having had no one to talk to about the things which have bothered me, I have been every now and then getting into fits of enthusiasm or despondency. But the result has been in some respects a good one, and I have got to take a very great pleasure in what you recommended to me when we were together at F[airford], the evening before I left you our first summer, i.e. good books; and I feel I[48] understand places in the Psalms in a way I never used to. I go back to Oxford with a determination to set to at Hebrew and the early Fathers,
and to keep myself in as strict order as I can: a thing which I have been making ineffectual attempts at for some time, but which never once entered my head for a long time of my life….
‘I wish you would say anything to me that you think would do me good, however severe it may be. You must have observed many things very contemptible in me, but I know worse of myself, and shall be prepared for anything. I cannot help being afraid that I am still deceiving myself about my motives and feelings, and shall be glad of anything on which to steady myself. Since I have been here I have been getting more comfortable than I had been for a good bit, from the society of I[saac][49] and P[revost][50] whom I get to like more and more every day…. We were to have wandered over North Wales together, but have been obliged to relinquish that scheme for this time, and perhaps it is a good thing, as far as I am concerned, to have a less exciting life for the present. I have had one bit of romance, viz., a walk early in the morning up the Vale of Rydal to Devil’s Bridge. The W[illiamses] wanted us to ride, but I thought I should remember it better by walking…. I shall always like scrambling expeditions as long as I can recollect ours up the Wye. Those few days seem like a bright spot in my existence; or perhaps it would be a more apt similitude to compare it to what you quoted as we were going in the boat to Tintern: “The shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”
‘I daresay you will think this letter rather strange, but it cannot do me any good to bottle everything up; besides, I think there is no pleasure in letters which do nothing but detail matters of fact. I should have liked much better to have seen you; but as I suppose there is no chance of that for some time, I must make the best of it. When I said that I had taken to liking good books, I did not mean that I had read many. I have read over and over again Bishop Taylor’s Holy Living
and Dying, but till I came here I had not gone farther; since, I have read five sermons of Bishop Wilson, one on the History of Christianity, and the others on Profiting by Sermons; also most of Law’s Serious Call, about which I remember what you said to me three years ago.’[51]
To the Rev. John Keble, Nov. 5, 1826.
‘It may seem an odd sort of thing to say, but I got from your letter something more like happiness than I have known since my mother died. Since that time it seems as if I had been ἄθεος ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ; but I hope I may yet get right at last. It is a great comfort to find so many expressions in the Psalms like “O tarry thou the Lord’s leisure,” as they serve to keep up the hope that, weary and unsatisfactory as are my attempts to be religious, they may in time “comfort my heart.” And now I can talk to you about myself, I feel a sort of security against bewildering my mind with vague thoughts, which I did not know where to check, because I could not get anyone to sympathise with them at all.
‘I have borrowed Mr. Bonnell’s Life,[52] and have got about two-thirds through it. I did not at first like the plan you recommended to me about reveries, as I had been directing all my actions with a view to fitting myself for realising my reveries. But it is a wretched unsatisfactory pursuit, for besides that it does not seem to have any real religion in it, I have often felt as if I had lost myself, and that I was acting blindly, without a drift. It is much better to give up all notion of guiding myself, and “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added.” I beg your pardon for putting before you the roundabout fantastic methods to which I have been resorting to arrive at
a plain simple truth that ought to have come at once; but perhaps they may serve to show the state of my mind better than any direct description I could give. It is very frightful to see people like Mr. Bonnell so alarmed about themselves, and expressing so strongly the wretchedness of their moral condition. It seems as if, to a fellow like me, it must always be presumptuous not to despair. The evening before last I was much struck with a thought in the beginning of Hooker’s Preface to the Ecclesiastical Polity, about not permitting thoughts to pass away as in a dream. It seems as if people might make so much more out of their lives by keeping records of them….