Froude’s allotted rooms were directly over Newman’s, in the Chapel angle of the Great Quad of Oriel College. The new Fellow did not, as such, come into residence until after the Easter vacation; during the following month, April, we find him still luxuriating in Devonshire and plunging deep into abstract metaphysics. ‘I have been taken with a fit of writing,’ he confesses to Keble. ‘I am happier than I ever was at Oxford, far: but that is not saying much.’ Apparently, he had posted manuscripts for criticism, and received it as gratefully and as combatively as usual. ‘I am infinitely indebted to you,’ he writes, ‘for your expeditious attention to my concern, and will try my best to set to rights the places you row [about]. However, I still maintain that my end is both relevant and true and my puzzle-headed antithesis a good one; but I bow my head in implicit confidence, as far as practice goes. Distinctions and refinements are growing on me, and I am all in a maze; and it is delightful to have the shadow of a great rock in a weary land to which I may turn for temporary shelter. If I had a year more, I could not make it at all to my satisfaction; so I must make the best of it.’ His note-books for this year and the next are full of the contemned ‘distinctions and refinements.’ In trying to beat out his conceptions of moral growth (a thing he refused to recognise in himself), he jots down some striking and arresting thoughts. Two or three which lie metaphysically not far apart, must suffice for transcription. They show the coherence, the synthetic power with which Froude’s philosophy knit all worlds into one. ――‘For whatever cause the great Author of Nature contrived that resemblance (as it appears to us) which subsists between the part of His dominions of which He has given us a consciousness, and that other part with which we are acquainted only through our understanding, it seems calculated to assist our conceptions of the one to observe what passes in the other…. The business of our life seems to be to acquire the habit of acting as we should do if we were _conscious_ of all that we _know_…. It is delightful to see things turn out well whose case seems in some sort to represent to us our indistinct conceptions of our own. Animals fainting under the effect of exercise, and then again recovering their strength which that very exercise has contributed to increase; the slow and, uncertain degrees in which this increase is effected, and yet the certainty in which it is effected: the growth of trees sometimes tossed by winds and checked by frosts, yet, by the evil effects of these winds, directed in what quarter to strike their roots so as to secure themselves for the future, and by these frosts hardened and fitted for a new progress the next summer:――in things of this sort I am so constituted as to see brethren in affliction evidently making progress towards release.’