In the early days of the movement, among Mr. Newman’s greatest friends, and much in his confidence, were two Fellows of Trinity—­a college which never forgot that Newman had once belonged to it,—­Isaac Williams and William John Copeland.  In mind and character very different, they were close friends, with the affection which was characteristic of those days; and for both of them Mr. Newman “had the love which passes that of common relation."[27] Isaac Williams was born among the mountains of Wales, and had the true poetic gift, though his power of expression was often not equal to what he wanted to say.  Copeland was a Londoner, bred up in the strict school of Churchmanship represented by Mr. Norris of Hackney, tempered by sympathies with the Non-jurors.  At Oxford he lived, along with Isaac Williams, in the very heart of the movement, which was the interest of his life; but he lived, self-forgetting or self-effacing, a wonderful mixture of tender and inexhaustible sympathy, and of quick and keen wit, which yet, somehow or other, in that time of exasperation and bitterness, made him few enemies.  He knew more than most men of the goings on of the movement, and he ought to have been its chronicler.  But he was fastidious and hard to satisfy, and he left his task till it was too late.

Isaac Williams was born in Wales in 1802, a year after Newman, ten years after John Keble.  His early life was spent in London, but his affection for Wales and its mountain scenery was great and undiminished to the end of his life.  At Harrow, where Henry Drury was his tutor, he made his mark by his mastery of Latin composition and his devotion to Latin language and literature.  “I was so used to think in Latin that when I had to write an English theme, which was but seldom, I had to translate my ideas, which ran in Latin, into English";[28] and later in life he complained of the Latin current which disturbed him when he had to write English.  He was also a great cricketer; and he describes himself as coming up to Trinity, where he soon got a scholarship, an ambitious and careless youth, who had never heard a word about Christianity, and to whom religion, its aims and its restraints, were a mere name.

This was changed by what, in the language of devotional schools, would have been called his conversion.  It came about, as men speak, as the result of accidents; but the whole course of his thoughts and life was turned into a channel from which it nevermore diverged.  An old Welsh clergyman gave the undergraduate an introduction to John Keble, who then held a place in Oxford almost unique.  But the Trinity undergraduate and the Oriel don saw little of one another till Isaac Williams won the Latin prize poem, Ars Geologica.  Keble then called on Isaac Williams and offered his help in criticising the poem and polishing it for printing.  The two men plainly took to one another at first sight; and that service was followed by a most unexpected invitation on Keble’s part.