In the strife of ideas, during the summer, there were not lacking pastoral interludes. To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, August, 1833. ‘… You can’t think what delicious weather we have had here [at Dartington]. It is like May back again…. I saw the other night what I can hardly convince myself not to have been a supernatural fire. I and one of the [Champernownes?] and two other boys, and a labourer, were coming up the river in a boat when it was dark, and we all saw as distinctly as possible under a tree, close by the water, what we took for a wood fire: hot embers, which did not blaze, but gave off sparks; the boys thought a wasp’s nest must have been burned out there, and landed to stir up the embers and examine; in landing we lost sight of the fire for a minute behind the bush, and in going to the place found nothing; no smell of burning, no ashes, no marks of fire on the leaves or grass: in fact, there certainly could not have been any fire there! The labourer was really frightened, and I cannot account for my not having been so; but somehow the thing has made an impression on my imagination. I never dream of it, nor think of it in the dark, or anything: yet I am absolutely certain of the facts, and wholly unable to account for them. Sometimes I look on it as a half-miracle, of which the counterpart is in store for us. The return of rough times may revive energies that have been dormant “in the land of peace wherein we trusted.” Is this nonsense?… I am very well, all but my cough, which is exactly what it was, and is likely to continue….’ This touch of mysticism, gracing a phosphoric phenomenon, reminds one keenly of what Newman thought and expressed about the whole Movement, if not of the men who seem to us now ‘of unearthly radiance.’ ‘No mortal incendiary,’ he said, in one of his splendid phrases already cited, ‘is at work.’ To Newman, during this August, Hurrell pours out his mind, with his usual forecasting irrelevance. ‘_Aug. 22._――I have written a sermon on the duty of contemplating a time when the law of the land shall cease to be the law of the Church; and I hope to get it preached by a friend of mine at the Bishop’s Visitation. My father thinks it most temperate and satisfactory.[151] If I had strong lungs I should go about the country, holding forth.