‘Yesterday morning brought me the news of Froude’s death; and if I could collect my thoughts at this moment, I would say something to you about him; but I scarcely can. He has been so very dear to me, that it is an effort to me to reflect on my own thoughts about him. I can never have a greater loss, looking on for the whole of my life, for he was to me, and he was likely to be ever, in the same degree of continual familiarity which I enjoyed with yourself in our undergraduate days…. It would have been a great satisfaction to me had you known him. You once saw him, indeed; but it was when his health was gone, and when you could have no idea of him. It is very mysterious that anyone so remarkably and variously gifted, and with talents so fitted for these times, should be removed. I never, on the whole, fell in with so gifted a person. In variety and perfection of gifts I think he far exceeded even Keble. For myself, I cannot describe what I owe to him as regards the intellectual principles of religion and morals. It is useless to go on to speak of him: it has pleased God to take him, in mercy to him, but by a very heavy visitation to all who were intimate with him. Yet everything was so bright and beautiful[263] about him, that to think of him must always be a comfort. The sad feeling I have is that one cannot retain in one’s memory all one wishes to keep there; and that as year passes after year, the image of him will be fainter and fainter.’ 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]