"Yewdale"--reprinted as Part V. of "Deucalion"--took an unusual importance in his own mind, not only because it was a great success as a lecture--though some Kendalians complained that there was not enough "information" in it:--but because it was the first given since that Christmas at Venice, when a new insight had been granted him, as he felt, into spiritual things, and a new burden laid on him, to withstand the rash conclusions of "science falsely so called," and to preach in their place the presence of God in nature and in man. Writing to Miss Beever about his Oxford course of that autumn, "Readings in Modern Painters," [38] he said, on the 2nd December: [Footnote 38: Nov. 6, 8, 10, 13, 15, 17, 20, 22, 24, 27, 29 and Dec. 1, 1877. These lectures were never prepared for publication as a course; the last lecture was printed in the _Nineteenth Century_ for January, 1878.] "I gave yesterday the twelfth and last of my course of lectures this term, to a room crowded by six hundred people, two-thirds members of the University, and with its door wedged open by those who could not get in; this interest of theirs being granted to me, I doubt not, because for the first time in Oxford I have been able to speak to them boldly of immortal life. I intended when I began the course only to have read 'Modern Painters' to them; but when I began, some of your favourite bits[39] interested the men so much, and brought so much larger a proportion of undergraduates than usual, that I took pains to re-inforce and press them home; and people say I have never given so useful a course yet. But it has taken all my time and strength." [Footnote 39: Miss Beever had published early in 1875 the extracts from "Modern Painters," so widely known as "Frondes Agrestes."] He wrote again, on Dec. 16th, from Herne Hill: "It is a long while since I've felt so good-for-nothing as I do this morning. My very wristbands curl up in a dog's-eared and disconsolate manner; my little room is all a heap of disorder. I've got a hoarseness and wheezing and sneezing and coughing and choking. I can't speak and I can't think; I'm miserable in bed and useless out of it; and it seems to me as if I could never venture to open a window or go out of a door any more. I have the dimmest sort of diabolical pleasure in thinking how miserable I shall make Susie by telling her all this; but in other respects I seem entirely devoid of all moral sentiments. I have arrived at this state of things, first by catching cold, and since trying to 'amuse myself' for three days." He goes on to give a list of his amusements--Pickwick, chivalric romances, the _Daily Telegraph_, Staunton's games of chess, and finally analysis of the Dock Company's bill of charges on a box from Venice. Ten days after he wrote from Oxford, in his whimsical style: