time at Clifton); add a simple natural
piety which purged the parsonic of all "churchiness."

"This silence and solitude are to me absolute food," he writes from
the Clifton College Library on the morning of Christmas Day, 1875,
"especially after all the row and worry at the end of Term. . . .
Where are the men and women? Well, now look here, you'll not mention
it again. They're all in church. See how good God is! See how He
has placed these leitourgic traps in which people, especially
disagreeable people, get caught--and lo! the universe for me!!! me--
me. . . ."

I have mentioned his fine manners, and with a certain right, since it once
fell to me--a blundering innocent in the hands of fate--to put them to
severest proof. A candidate for a scholarship at Clifton--awkward, and
abominably conscious of it, and sensitive--I had been billeted on Brown's
hospitality without his knowledge. The mistake (I cannot tell who was
responsible) could not be covered out of sight; it was past all aid of
kindly dissimulation by the time Brown returned to the house to find the
unwelcome guest bathing in shame upon his doorstep. Can I say more than
that he took me into the family circle--by no means an expansive one, or
accustomed, as some are, to open gleefully to intruders--and for the
inside of a week treated me with a consideration so quiet and pleasant, so
easy yet attentive, that his dearest friend or most distinguished visitor
could not have demanded more? A boy notes these things, and remembers.
. . . "If I lose my manners," Mr. Irwin quotes him as saying once over
some trivial forgetfulness, "what is to become of me?" He was shy, too,
like the most of his countrymen--"jus' the shy "--but with a proud reserve
as far removed as possible from sham humility--being all too sensible and
far too little of a fool to blink his own eminence of mind, though willing
on all right occasions to forget it. "Once," records Mr. Irwin, "when I
remarked on the omission of his name in an article on 'Minor Poets' in one
of the magazines, he said, with a smile, 'Perhaps I am among the major!'"
That smile had just sufficient irony--no more.

To this we may add a passion for music and a passion for external nature--
external to the most of us, but so closely knit with his own that to be
present at his ecstasies was like assisting a high priest of elemental
mysteries reserved for him and beyond his power