‘I have just got here from Lyndhurst, and find the Oxford coach full. Nothing therefore is left for me but to go up to London, and try to get to Oxford in that way. Be so good as to make my excuses to College for my non-appearance: it is the first time, I believe, I ever was away any day of an Audit, (except when abroad) since I have been Fellow. I trust I shall be with you to-morrow. ‘Dear Froude is pretty well, but is languishing for want of his Oxford contubernians. I trust I have been of use, in this way, in stimulating his spirits. So strongly do I feel this, from what I see and hear of him, that I mean almost to make myself responsible for some intimate going down to him at Christmas. He is allowed to read now, which is a great comfort. I am to send him a lot of books. It is wonderful, almost mysterious, that he should remain so long just afloat, and as far as it is mysterious, it is hopeful. Really, it would seem as if he were kept alive by the uplifted hands of Moses: which is an encouragement to persevere [in prayer].’ The delayed traveller wrote to Hurrell the day after his arrival at Oxford: ‘St. Luke’s Day, 1835. ‘I have been obliged to come round by London, and having business there, I did not regret it. Rivington will publish a third volume [of _Sermons_]; and please will you manage to get for me your father’s leave to dedicate it, in a few words, to him? Keble was married on the 10th, and told no one. The College has but heard from him that he resigns his Fellowship on that day, without a year of grace.[245] I engage to undertake and pledge myself to provide a visitor for you next Christmas: Rogers, or [Tom] Mozley, or Williams. But if no one comes, I shall come myself, which would be too great a pleasure: for I cannot put into words, or rather I do not realise to myself, how much the _genius loci_ of Dartington Parsonage draws. I could be very foolish did I allow myself! All my own reminiscences of the place are sad, and I am almost debarred from them; and I seem to have no right, _alienigena_, to intrude elsewhere.’ Newman adds his parenthesis long, long after. ‘This feeling is expressed in the verses I wrote on my first visit to Dartington, in 1831: ‘There strayed awhile, amid the woods of Dart. I have never seen Dartington since I saw Hurrell there.’[246] He shared to the full, as we have seen, Hurrell’s own passion for the place, a place even yet, despite the profane railway along the very bank of the Dart, of romance and peace; but he held his dedicated heart aloof from it in 1835 as in 1831, as a passage in a letter to his elder sister shows: ‘This country [Devon], is certainly overpoweringly beautiful and enchanting, except to those who are resolved not to be enchanted.’ To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, _Die Omnium Sanctorum_, 1835.