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INTRODUCTION. xiii
This brought him in personal contact with Mr. Newman. He wrote to his friend Morris, in April, 1837, that his whole time was so occupied with four pupils, his required reading, and his work on Saint Optatus, that he had hardly an hour to himself for letter-writing. During the long vacation he took a few pupils to Ambleside, and this brought him into intimate relations with Wordsworth. He already called himself a Wordsworthian. He used in after years to describe the long rambles which he and the poet took together over the romantic Lake region which both of them celebrated in song.
He became a deacon in the Anglican Church in August, and assisted in parochial work at Ambleside, preaching generally two sermons a week.
In 1839, ne was ordained as priest; and, in the course of that summer, he made a trip through Belgium and the Rhine provinces. The superstition and low intellectual state of the Roman Catholic clergy inspired him with contempt.
The following year, he became the resident tutor to a son of Matthew Harrison at Ambleside, where he still kept up his parochial work; and he published a small collection of poems, which met with success. He had also some thought of marriage; but as the person alluded to in his poem, " First Love/' was not in love with him, and as he was not in love with her, though she was the only woman in the world whom |
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