St. Mary's on the Sundays, when the great
High Church preacher of the moment occupied the pulpit, and looked down
on the crowded building, full of grave black-gowned figures and framed
in one continuous belt of closely packed boyish faces; as he listened
to the preacher's vibrating voice, rising and falling with the
orator's instinct for musical effect; or as he stood up with the great
surrounding body of undergraduates to send the melody of some Latin hymn
rolling into the far recesses of the choir, the sight and the experience
touched his inmost feeling, and satisfied all the poetical and dramatic
instincts of a passionate nature. The system behind the sight took
stronger and stronger hold upon him; he began to wish ardently and
continuously to become a part of it, to cast in his lot definitely with
it.

One May evening he was wandering by himself along the towing-path which
skirts the upper river, a prey to many thoughts, to forebodings about
the schools which were to begin in three weeks, and to speculations
as to how his mother would take the news of the second class, which he
himself felt to be inevitable. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, there
flashed into his mind the little conversation with his mother, which
had taken place nearly four years before, in the garden at Trinity. He
remembered the antagonism which the idea of a clerical life for him
had raised in both of them, and a smile at his own ignorance and his
mother's prejudice passed over his quick young face. He sat down on the
grassy bank, a mass of reeds at his feet, the shadows of the poplars
behind him lying across the still river; and opposite, the wide green
expanse of the great town-meadow, dotted with white patches of geese
and herds of grazing horses. There, with a sense of something solemn and
critical passing over him, he began to dream out his future life.

And when he rose half an hour afterward, and turned his steps homeward,
he knew with an inward tremor of heart that the next great step of the
way was practically taken. For there by the gliding river, and in view
of the distant Oxford spires, which his fancy took to witness the act,
he had vowed himself in prayer and self-abasement to the ministry of the
Church.

During the three weeks that followed he made some frantic efforts to
make up lost ground. He had not been idle for a single day, but he
had been unwise, an intellectual spendthrift, living in a continuous
succession of enthus