The Vacation passed away silently and happily. Day succeeded day in
quiet routine employments, bringing insensible but sure accessions to
the stock of knowledge and to the intellectual proficiency of both our
students. Historians and orators were read for a last time, and laid
aside; sciences were digested; commentaries were run through; and
analyses and abstracts completed. It was emphatically a silent toil.
While others might be steaming from London to Bombay or the Havannah,
and months in the retrospect might look like years, with Reding and
Sheffield the week had scarcely begun when it was found to be ending;
and when October came, and they saw their Oxford friends again, at
first they thought they had a good deal to say to them, but when they
tried, they found it did but concern minute points of their own reading
and personal matters; and they were reduced to silence with the wish to
speak.
The season had changed, and reminded them that Horsley was a place
for summer sojourn, not a dwelling. There were heavy raw fogs hanging
about the hills, and storms of wind and rain. The grass no longer
afforded them a seat; and when they betook themselves indoors it was
discovered that the doors and windows did not shut close, and that the
chimney smoked. Then came those fruits, the funeral feast of the year,
mulberries and walnuts; the tasteless, juiceless walnut; the dark
mulberry, juicy but severe, and mouldy withal, as gathered not from the
tree, but from the damp earth. And thus that green spot itself weaned
them from the love of it. Charles looked around him, and rose to depart
as a conviva satur. “Edisti satis, tempus abire” seemed
written upon all. The swallows had taken leave; the leaves were paling;
the light broke late, and failed soon. The hopes of spring, the peace
and calm of summer, had given place to the sad realities of autumn. He
was hurrying to the world, who had been up on the mount; he had lived
without jars, without distractions, without disappointments; and he was
now to take them as his portion. For he was but a child of Adam;
Horsley had been but a respite; and he had vividly presented to his
memory the sad reverse which came upon him two years before—what a
happy summer—what a forlorn autumn! With these thoughts, he put up his
books and papers, and turned his face towards St. Saviour's.
Oxford, too, was not quite what it had been to him; the freshness of
his admiration for it was over; he now saw defects where at first all
was excellent and good; the romance of places and persons had passed
away. And there were changes too: of his contemporaries some had
already taken their degrees and left; others were reading in the
country; others had gone off to other Colleges on Fellowships. A host
of younger faces had sprung up in hall and chapel, and he hardly knew
their names. Rooms which formerly had been his familiar lounge were now
tenanted by strangers, who claimed to have that right in them which, to
his imagination, could only attach to those who had possessed them when
he himself came into residence. The College seemed to have
deteriorated; there was a rowing set, which had not been there before,
a number of boys, and a large proportion of snobs.
But, what was a real trouble to Charles, it got clearer and clearer
to his apprehension that his intimacy with Sheffield was not quite what
it had been. They had, indeed, passed the Vacation together, and saw of
each other more than ever: but their sympathies in each other were not
as strong, they had not the same likings and dislikings; in short, they
had not such congenial minds as they fancied when they were freshmen.
There was not so much heart in their conversations, and they more
easily endured to miss each other's company. They were both reading for
honours—reading hard; but Sheffield's whole heart was in his work, and
religion was but a secondary matter to him. He had no doubts,
difficulties, anxieties, sorrows, which much affected him. It was not
the certainty of faith which made a sunshine to his soul, and dried up
the mists of human weakness; rather, he had no perceptible need within
him of that vision of the Unseen which is the Christian's life. He was
unblemished in his character, exemplary in his conduct; but he was
content with what the perishable world gave him. Charles's
characteristic, perhaps above anything else, was an habitual sense of
the Divine Presence; a sense which, of course, did not insure
uninterrupted conformity of thought and deed to itself, but still there
it was—the pillar of the cloud before him and guiding him. He felt
himself to be God's creature, and responsible to Him—God's possession,
not his own. He had a great wish to succeed in the schools; a thrill
came over him when he thought of it; but ambition was not his life; he
could have reconciled himself in a few minutes to failure. Thus
disposed, the only subjects on which the two friends freely talked
together were connected with their common studies. They read together,
examined each other, used and corrected each other's papers, and solved
each other's difficulties. Perhaps it scarcely came home to Sheffield,
sharp as he was, that there was any flagging of their intimacy.
Religious controversy had been the food of his active intellect when it
was novel; now it had lost its interest, and his books took its place.
But it was far different with Charles; he had felt interest in
religious questions for their own sake; and when he had deprived
himself of the pursuit of them it had been a self-denial. Now, then,
when they seemed forced on him again, Sheffield could not help him,
where he most wanted the assistance of a friend.
A still more tangible trial was coming on him. The reader has to be
told that there was at that time a system of espionage prosecuted by
various well-meaning men, who thought it would be doing the University
a service to point out such of its junior members as were what is
called “papistically inclined.” They did not perceive the danger such a
course involved of disposing young men towards Catholicism, by
attaching to them the bad report of it, and of forcing them farther by
inflicting on them the inconsistencies of their position. Ideas which
would have lain dormant or dwindled away in their minds were thus
fixed, defined, located within them; and the fear of the world's
censure no longer served to deter, when it had been actually incurred.
When Charles attended the tea-party at Freeborn's he was on his trial;
he was introduced not only into a school, but into an inquisition; and
since he did not promise to be a subject for spiritual impression, he
was forthwith a subject for spiritual censure. He became a marked man
in the circles of Capel Hall and St. Mark's. His acquaintance with
Willis; the questions he had asked at the Article-lecture; stray
remarks at wine-parties—were treasured up, and strengthened the case
against him. One time, on coming into his rooms, he found Freeborn, who
had entered to pay him a call, prying into his books. A volume of
sermons, of the school of the day, borrowed of a friend for the sake of
illustrating Aristotle, lay on his table; and in his bookshelves one of
the more philosophical of the “Tracts for the Times” was stuck in
between a Hermann De Metris and a Thucydides. Another day his
bedroom door was open, and No. 2 of the tea-party saw one of Overbeck's
sacred prints pinned up against the wall.
Facts like these were, in most cases, delated to the Head of the
House to which a young man belonged; who, as a vigilant guardian of the
purity of his undergraduates' Protestantism, received the information
with thankfulness, and perhaps asked the informer to dinner. It cannot
be denied that in some cases this course of action succeeded in
frightening and sobering the parties towards whom it was directed.
White was thus reclaimed to be a devoted son and useful minister of the
Church of England; but it was a kill-or-cure remedy, and not likely to
answer with the more noble or the more able minds. What effect it had
upon Charles, or whether any, must be determined by the sequel; here it
will suffice to relate interviews which took place between him and the
Principal and Vice-Principal of his College in consequence of it.