ht. It has been the most eventful
year of my life: I began it a poor bachelor student, with no
definite plans or expectations; I end it a master and tutor
in Ch. Ch., with an income of more than L300 a year, and the
course of mathematical tuition marked out by God's
providence for at least some years to come. Great mercies,
great failings, time lost, talents misapplied--such has been
the past year.

His Diary is full of such modest depreciations of himself and his
work, interspersed with earnest prayers (too sacred and private to be
reproduced here) that God would forgive him the past, and help him to
perform His holy will in the future. And all the time that he was thus
speaking of himself as a sinner, and a man who was utterly falling
short of his aim, he was living a life full of good deeds and
innumerable charities, a life of incessant labour and unremitting
fulfilment of duty. So, I suppose, it is always with those who have a
really high ideal; the harder they try to approach it the more it
seems to recede from them, or rather, perhaps, it is impossible to be
both "the subject and spectator" of goodness. As Coventry Patmore
wrote:--

Become whatever good you see;
Nor sigh if, forthwith, fades from view
The grace of which you may not be
The Subject and spectator too.

The reading of "Alton Locke" turned his mind towards social subjects.
"If the book were but a little more definite," he writes, "it might
stir up many fellow-workers in the same good field of social
improvement. Oh that God, in His good providence, may make me
hereafter such a worker! But alas, what are the means? Each one has
his own _nostrum_ to propound, and in the Babel of voices nothing
is done. I would thankfully spend and be spent so long as I were sure
of really effecting something by the sacrifice, and not merely lying
down under the wheels of some irresistible Juggernaut."

He was for some time the editor of _College Rhymes_, a Christ
Church paper, in which his poem, "A Sea Dirge" (afterwards republished
in "Phantasmagoria," and again in "Rhyme? and Reason?"), first
appeared. The following verses were among his contributions to the
same magazine:--

I painted her a gushing thing,
With years perhaps a score
I little thought to find they were
At least a dozen more;
My fancy gave her eyes of blue,
A curly auburn head:
I came to find the blue a green,