‘… Thinking that you may wish to know something of my concerns, and wishing to know something of yours, … I send you the following. As to myself, about which valuable thing I am most concerned, you must know that I have at last found a κρησφύγετον in barley-sugar; only to think that my stars should let me off so easily! Sucking has had a most wonderful effect on me, and has removed nearly all that F[airford][89] had left of tendency to irritation; I might say all, if I could suck continually, but just now these east winds take advantage of casual intervals, and remind me that I am not perfectly at liberty. However, I have left off my handkerchief, and never feel the want of it; also, I am up at half-past six every morning; and taking an enlarged view of myself, I think my condition to be approved of.’
Up to July 31, Froude remained in Oxford, being and doing with all his usual zest, writing his papers on architecture, proving a very well-head of vitality to his friends, and ‘living his life.’ Could it have been indeed as early as this that he cut across the preliminaries described by Lord Blachford,[90] and paralysed an intended appeal to Bishops and Deans by announcing that he, for one, meant to ‘get on the box’ in person? This is thought to be the moment of Miss Giberne’s inspiration. It would seem as if the date should be a year later. In July of 1832 the Tutorial question was over; and there was no other agendum in debate between Froude and Newman. However that may be, there in the handsome lady’s sketch-book is Hurrell, smoothly, almost infantinely, mischievous, with one obedient Mozley to listen and abet; there is Newman, at an angle of the ottoman, distinctly not surveying with fond adoring gaze and yearning heart his friend (as he says he does, in a poem, part of which, at least, was written that very week), but back to back with him, sulking furiously, and putting on a silent stare which sufficiently expresses human disapproval: that little sudden void stare,
entirely characteristic, as of one who is forced to survey, for the time being, an endless vista of Siberian snows.
It was a boding time; the cholera was raging all about; Newman himself was tired and dejected from overwork, and none too hopeful concerning Hurrell’s health or the impending prospect of separation. Long after, annotating his own correspondence at Edgbaston, he tells us something special about the lines just referred to, in what may be called, from a merely literary point of view, one of the most successful, though one of the least known, of his shorter lyrics. Hurrell’s share in it is no more, so to speak, than a tiny marginal portrait of him, tender, in passing, as the work of some old Flemish illuminator. Newman ascribes the origin of the last lines to this July. ‘With reference to the memory of that parting, when I shook hands with him, and looked into his face with great affection, I afterwards wrote the stanza:
‘And when thine eye surveys
With fond adoring gaze
And yearning heart, thy friend,
Love to its grave doth tend.’[91]
But it is remarkable that the completed poem is dated Valetta, January 30, 1833: as if to mark the vanishing of the only shadow which ever crossed the united path of Newman and Froude; and that shadow was due, as we shall see, to a fancy of Newman’s, conceived in illness. Abstract and gnomic as his verses are, two human faces, nameless but recognisable, look through them with ‘sad eyes spiritual and clear.’ One is Mary Newman’s, in her sisterly youth;[92] the other is Hurrell Froude’s. Dearly as Newman loved his many friends, then and after (and as Dean Church reminds us, mutual affection as profound as that of the early Christians, was the very hall-mark of the Tractarians), there is but one friend discernible in the long vista of his poetry, most of which was written in his living presence. Hurrell may never have suspected as much. The temper of both, shrinking from the
least emotional emphasis, would have precluded any open give-and-take. The privilege of being English has its own system of taxation. The Cardinal, in his old age (possibly when Little Lord Fauntleroy was overrunning the stage), had to assure some inquirer, by post, that he hardly had been in the habit of addressing Hurrell as ‘Dearest,’ in the prose exigences of every day.