perception to which I can attain is to observe that a note harmonises better with its octave, twelfth, and fifth, than with their next-door neighbours. I also can acknowledge a discord in a deuce[67] and a seventh; but as for knowing one from the other, unless they come very close on each other, it passes my comprehension how man can do it…. I am quite ashamed of the length of time this has been on the stocks, and of the shabby performance which it turns out. Alas, it is a sad reflection that I am condemned to retrograde in all respects: to find no resting-place for my self-complacency either in my intellectual, moral, or corporeal prowess, and notwithstanding to be as conceited as ever!’
This was a note of needless dissatisfaction only too sincere, repeated in Keble’s ear. ‘As for me, I despair of ever becoming a scholar or mathematician either, beyond just enough to amuse myself when I am a solitary country Curate….’
1829 is a silent year with Hurrell, on the whole. He had lost his beloved brother, and he was preparing for his own Ordination. In the late summer he paid his first visit to his cousins at Keswick.
To the Rev. John Keble, Sept. 17, 1829.
‘The evening I received your criticisms I wrote you three sides of a letter, and did not send it, only because I thought time would produce things better worth writing: and now I am so changed in position and circumstances I think I may as well begin again. So all I will retain of my former letter is a criticism on The Christian Year, suggested by a very tempestuous night, in which all our party were crossing the Channel in a pilot-boat. You must not say “the wild wind rustles in the piping shrouds”:[68] shrouds never “pipe” when trees or rustling can be presented to the fancy, but only on occasions when it is more sublime than comfortable to be a
listener. This, in my letter, I endeavoured to enforce by a description of the scene I witnessed, and the night I spent on deck: but I doubt not you will willingly take all this for granted…. I left Devonshire more than a fortnight since for Cumberland. [Dornford?][69] made me stay some time in Dublin, which was my first stage, and is, in point of time, much the nearest way: and also sent me into the north of Ireland after Captain Mudge, who is surveying the coast. In my hunt for him, I saw the Giants’ Causeway, every stone of which is beset by some fellow who claims a fee for describing it. It is certainly well worth seeing; but you can conceive nothing so perfectly unlike any of the pretended representations of it. I made two bad drawings there, which will serve to keep it in my own mind, but will do little to illuminate mankind at large. I am forgetting all this while to tell you that, while at Dublin, I found I was within twenty-five miles of
‘“The Lake whose gloomy shore
Skylark never warbles o’er”:
and immediately hired a horse, to start the next morning at five to see it. I was most unlucky in my day, as it had been fine for the preceding week, and only set in for rain when I got among the Wicklow mountains. I had a very wild romantic uncomfortable ride through a wholly uninhabited country, till I got within the baleful influence of lionisers,[70] and was pestered out of my wits by humbugging guides who dinned into my ears miserable expansions of Tom Moore’s note about St. Kevin, till I was quite out of patience. The day was so misty that it was only once or twice that I could make out the scene distinctly, and so constantly raining, that all my paper was soaked in trying to draw what I could make out. By dint of perseverance, I crawled into poor St. Kevin’s[71] cell, which is hardly large enough to coil one’s self up in,
and when I was there hardly a square foot of it was dry: so the day answered the purpose, at any rate, of showing me that there is a dark side to a hermit’s existence. He had chosen himself a most picturesque rocky point, which projects a little into the Lake, with one or two hollies and mountain ashes growing up in its crevices; and cut out a cell for himself in its perpendicular face. It would take too much space to describe the grand gloom of the Lake, the seven ruined Churches on its borders (one of which is still a burial-ground for the Roman Catholics), and that extraordinary Tower, a relic of paganism, which stands in one of the churchyards.