Fellowship. His honours were borne with meekness
and simplicity; to his attainments he joined a temper
of singular sweetness and modesty, capable at the
same time, when necessary, of austere strength and
strictness of principle. He had become one of
the most distinguished men in Oxford, when about the
year 1823 he felt himself bound to give himself more
exclusively to the work of a clergyman, and left Oxford
to be his father’s curate. There was nothing
very unusual in his way of life, or singular and showy
in his work as a clergyman; he went in and out among
the poor, he was not averse to society, he preached
plain, unpretending, earnest sermons; he kept up his
literary interests. But he was a deeply convinced
Churchman, finding his standard and pattern of doctrine
and devotion in the sober earnestness and dignity
of the Prayer Book, and looking with great and intelligent
dislike at the teaching and practical working of the
more popular system which, under the name of Evangelical
Christianity, was aspiring to dominate religious opinion,
and which, often combining some of the most questionable
features of Methodism and Calvinism, denounced with
fierce intolerance everything that deviated from its
formulas and watchwords. And as his loyalty to
the Church of England was profound and intense, all
who had shared her fortunes, good or bad, or who professed
to serve her, had a place in his affections; and any
policy which threatened to injure or oppress her,
and any principles which were hostile to her influence
and teaching, roused his indignation and resistance.
He was a strong Tory, and by conviction and religious
temper a thorough High Churchman.
But there was nothing in him to foreshadow the leader
in a bold and wide-reaching movement. He was
absolutely without ambition. He hated show and
mistrusted excitement. The thought of preferment
was steadily put aside both from temper and definite
principle. He had no popular aptitudes, and was
very suspicious of them. He had no care for the
possession of influence; he had deliberately chosen
the fallentis semita vitae, and to be what
his father had been, a faithful and contented country
parson, was all that he desired. But idleness
was not in his nature. Born a poet, steeped in
all that is noblest and tenderest and most beautiful
in Greek and Roman literature, with the keenest sympathy
with that new school of poetry which, with Wordsworth
as its representative, was searching out the deeper
relations between nature and the human soul, he found
in poetical composition a vent and relief for feelings
stirred by the marvels of glory and of awfulness, and
by the sorrows and blessings, amid which human life
is passed. But his poetry was for a long time
only for himself and his intimate friends; his indulgence
in poetical composition was partly playful, and it
was not till after much hesitation on his own part
and also on theirs, and with a contemptuous undervaluing
of his work, which continued to the end of his life,