The long-memoried man who uttered that was only too conscious that he had no portrait of his departed friend.
On the 6th, turning aside from other things, Newman says, in his thrilling undertone, to Keble:
‘… We have indeed had an irreparable loss; but I have for years expected it. I would fain be his heir. When I was with him in October, I so wished to drink out his thoughts, but found they would not flow except in orderly course, as all God’s gifts. It was an idea of Bowden’s, the other day, that as time goes on, and more and more Saints are gathered in, fewer are needed on earth: the City of God has surer and deeper foundations, day by day.’
Some thought of kindred wing crossed at the same time the mind of Charlotte Keble at Hursley. ‘I shall be very glad,’ she says, feelingly, to her sister-in-law Elizabeth on March 9, ‘for poor Mr. Newman to have the comfort of John’s being in Oxford. He seems very much to need it; and nobody, I suppose, can so entirely sympathise with him, both in his distress for the loss, and also in the views and opinions which knit them all three together. I can’t help thinking (at least, one doesn’t know), but that Mr. Froude may in some way or
other be of more service now than if he had been kept here longer.’[264]
Perhaps no apology need be made for dwelling on the impression left by Hurrell Froude on the minds of his comrades, above all, on the mind of his best-loved comrade, after he had passed away. This afterglow, this ‘trailing cloud of glory,’ is biographic comment indeed. He had lived so detached a life that it is pleasant to associate him, at the last, with the schwärmerei of much tender common human sorrow, with sorrow sure of his own immortal continued interest in all that he had worked for in England: for it helps to show him less as an elf and a ‘kinless loon,’ than as the Saint-errant which, through his thirty-two years, he was.
The heavy blow of his mother’s unexpected death fell on Newman in May. The association of this loss with the sharp foregoing one, and the remembrance of Froude, whom he had known and lived with so happily since they first became colleagues at Oriel, are palpable enough in the brave sigh of that greatly religious soul, breathed in a letter to Harriett Newman, dated June 21, 1836:
‘You have nothing to be uneasy at, so far as I am concerned. Thank God, my spirits have not sunk, nor will they, I trust. I have been full of work, and that keeps me generally free from dejection. If it ever comes, it is never of long continuance, and is even not unwelcome. I am speaking of dejection from solitude. I never feel so near Heaven as then. Years ago, from 1822 to 1826, I used to be very much by myself, and in anxieties of various kinds which were very harassing. I then, on the whole, had no friend near me, no one to whom I opened my mind fully, or who could sympathise with me. I am but returning, at worst, to that state … and after all, this life is very short, and it is a better thing to be pursuing what seems God’s Will than to be looking after one’s own comfort. I am learning more than hitherto to live in the presence of the dead: this is a gain which strange faces cannot take away.’
Less than a year later, a similar strain comes like a music of triumph over sorrow in such a letter to Frederic Rogers,