The Vacation passed away silently and happily. Day succeeded day in
quiet routine employments, bringing insensible but sure accessions to
the stock of knowledge and to the intellectual proficiency of both our
students. Historians and orators were read for a last time, and laid
aside; sciences were digested; commentaries were run through; and
analyses and abstracts completed. It was emphatically a silent toil.
While others might be steaming from London to Bombay or the Havannah,
and months in the retrospect might look like years, with Reding and
Sheffield the week had scarcely begun when it was found to be ending;
and when October came, and they saw their Oxford friends again, at first
they thought they had a good deal to say to them, but when they tried,
they found it did but concern minute points of their own reading and
personal matters; and they were reduced to silence with the wish to
speak.
The season had changed, and reminded them that Horsley was a place for
summer sojourn, not a dwelling. There were heavy raw fogs hanging about
the hills, and storms of wind and rain. The grass no longer afforded
them a seat; and when they betook themselves indoors it was discovered
that the doors and windows did not shut close, and that the chimney
smoked. Then came those fruits, the funeral feast of the year,
mulberries and walnuts; the tasteless, juiceless walnut; the dark
mulberry, juicy but severe, and mouldy withal, as gathered not from the
tree, but from the damp earth. And thus that green spot itself weaned
them from the love of it. Charles looked around him, and rose to depart
as a _conviva satur_. "_Edisti satis, tempus abire_" seemed written upon
all. The swallows had taken leave; the leaves were paling; the light
broke late, and failed soon. The hopes of spring, the peace and calm of
summer, had given place to the sad realities of autumn. He was hurrying
to the world, who had been up on the mount; he had lived without jars,
without distractions, without disappointments; and he was now to take
them as his portion. For he was but a child of Adam; Horsley had been
but a respite; and he had vividly presented to his memory the sad
reverse which came upon him two years before--what a happy summer--what
a forlorn autumn! With these thoughts, he put up his books and papers,
and turned his face towards St. Saviour's.
Oxford, too, was not quite what it had been to him; the freshness of his
admiration for it was over; he now saw defects where at first all was
excellent and good; the romance of places and persons had passed away.
And there were changes too: of his contemporaries some had already taken
their degrees and left; others were reading in the country; others had
gone off to other Colleges on Fellowships. A host of younger faces had
sprung up in hall and chapel, and he hardly knew their names. Rooms
which formerly had been his familiar lounge were now tenanted by
strangers, who claimed to have that right in them which, to his
imagination, could only attach to those who had possessed them when he
himself came into residence. The College seemed to have deteriorated;
there was a rowing set, which had not been there before, a number of
boys, and a large proportion of snobs.
But, what was a real trouble to Charles, it got clearer and clearer to
his apprehension that his intimacy with Sheffield was not quite what it
had been. They had, indeed, passed the Vacation together, and saw of
each other more than ever: but their sympathies in each other were not
as strong, they had not the same likings and dislikings; in short, they
had not such congenial minds as they fancied when they were freshmen.
There was not so much heart in their conversations, and they more easily
endured to miss each other's company. They were both reading for
honours--reading hard; but Sheffield's whole heart was in his work, and
religion was but a secondary matter to him. He had no doubts,
difficulties, anxieties, sorrows, which much affected him. It was not
the certainty of faith which made a sunshine to his soul, and dried up
the mists of human weakness; rather, he had no perceptible need within
him of that vision of the Unseen which is the Christian's life. He was
unblemished in his character, exemplary in his conduct; but he was
content with what the perishable world gave him. Charles's
characteristic, perhaps above anything else, was an habitual sense of
the Divine Presence; a sense which, of course, did not insure
uninterrupted conformity of thought and deed to itself, but still there
it was--the pillar of the cloud before him and guiding him. He felt
himself to be God's creature, and responsible to Him--God's possession,
not his own. He had a great wish to succeed in the schools; a thrill
came over him when he thought of it; but ambition was not his life; he
could have reconciled himself in a few minutes to failure. Thus
disposed, the only subjects on which the two friends freely talked
together were connected with their common studies. They read together,
examined each other, used and corrected each other's papers, and solved
each other's difficulties. Perhaps it scarcely came home to Sheffield,
sharp as he was, that there was any flagging of their intimacy.
Religious controversy had been the food of his active intellect when it
was novel; now it had lost its interest, and his books took its place.
But it was far different with Charles; he had felt interest in religious
questions for their own sake; and when he had deprived himself of the
pursuit of them it had been a self-denial. Now, then, when they seemed
forced on him again, Sheffield could not help him, where he most wanted
the assistance of a friend.
A still more tangible trial was coming on him. The reader has to be told
that there was at that time a system of espionage prosecuted by various
well-meaning men, who thought it would be doing the University a service
to point out such of its junior members as were what is called
"papistically inclined." They did not perceive the danger such a course
involved of disposing young men towards Catholicism, by attaching to
them the bad report of it, and of forcing them farther by inflicting on
them the inconsistencies of their position. Ideas which would have lain
dormant or dwindled away in their minds were thus fixed, defined,
located within them; and the fear of the world's censure no longer
served to deter, when it had been actually incurred. When Charles
attended the tea-party at Freeborn's he was on his trial; he was
introduced not only into a school, but into an inquisition; and since he
did not promise to be a subject for spiritual impression, he was
forthwith a subject for spiritual censure. He became a marked man in the
circles of Capel Hall and St. Mark's. His acquaintance with Willis; the
questions he had asked at the Article-lecture; stray remarks at
wine-parties--were treasured up, and strengthened the case against him.
One time, on coming into his rooms, he found Freeborn, who had entered
to pay him a call, prying into his books. A volume of sermons, of the
school of the day, borrowed of a friend for the sake of illustrating
Aristotle, lay on his table; and in his bookshelves one of the more
philosophical of the "Tracts for the Times" was stuck in between a
Hermann _De Metris_ and a Thucydides. Another day his bedroom door was
open, and No. 2 of the tea-party saw one of Overbeck's sacred prints
pinned up against the wall.
Facts like these were, in most cases, delated to the Head of the House
to which a young man belonged; who, as a vigilant guardian of the purity
of his undergraduates' Protestantism, received the information with
thankfulness, and perhaps asked the informer to dinner. It cannot be
denied that in some cases this course of action succeeded in frightening
and sobering the parties towards whom it was directed. White was thus
reclaimed to be a devoted son and useful minister of the Church of
England; but it was a kill-or-cure remedy, and not likely to answer with
the more noble or the more able minds. What effect it had upon Charles,
or whether any, must be determined by the sequel; here it will suffice
to relate interviews which took place between him and the Principal and
Vice-Principal of his College in consequence of it.