he
frosty _Ode to the Nativity_ with the _Allegro and Penseroso_. 'The two
idylls,' he says, 'breathe the free air of spring and summer and of the
fields round Horton. They are thoroughly naturalistic; the choicest
expression our language has yet found of the fresh charm of country
life, not as that life is lived by the peasant, but as it is felt by a
young and lettered student, issuing at early dawn or at sunset from his
chamber and his books. All such sights and sounds and smells are here
blended in that ineffable combination which once or twice, perhaps, in
our lives has saluted our young senses before their perceptions were
blunted by alcohol, by lust, or ambition, or diluted by the social
distractions of great cities' (Pattison's _Milton_, 24).

For the examination school no preparation could have been worse. It was
no wonder that so uncalculating an adjustment of means and ends resulted
in a second class (1836). The class was not merely a misfortune in
itself, but threatened to be a bar to the fulfilment of his lifelong
dream of a fellowship. He tried his fortunes at University, where he was
beaten by Faber; and at Oriel, his own college, where he was beaten by
the present Dean of St. Paul's. 'There was such a moral beauty about
Church,' it was said by a man not peculiarly sensitive about moral
beauty, 'that they could not help liking him.' Though Pattison had
failed, Newman sent him word that there were some who thought that he
had done the best. He made two more unsuccessful attempts, in one of
them the triumphant competitor being Stanley, the famous Dean of a later
day. At last, in November 1838, he was elected to a Yorkshire fellowship
at Lincoln College. 'No moment in all my life,' he says, 'has ever been
so sweet as that Friday morning, when Radford's servant came in to
announce my election, and to claim his five shillings for doing so.' Yet
if the curtain of fate could have been raised, his election to the
Lincoln fellowship might have disclosed itself as the central misfortune
of his life.

'All this while,' he says, 'I was rushing into the whirlpool of
Tractarianism; was very much noticed by Newman--in fact fanaticism was
laying its deadly grip around me.' He had come up from Yorkshire with
what he calls his 'home Puritan religion almost narrowed to two
points--fear of God's wrath and faith in the doctrine of the Atonement.'
He found Newman and his allies actively dissolving this hard creed by
means of