Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman by Giberne Sieveking
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page 27 of 413 (06%)
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Economy. His talents and piety attracted my admiration, for I had never
seen such young men before. They had both been pupils of Mr. Mayers at a large school at Ealing (in which he was a master), and were considered to be converted in very early life." Later on is another entry:-- "In the midsummer holidays of 1825" (John Henry Newman was ordained priest on 29th May, 1825), "I went to stay with Walter and Sarah Mayers, and then began my first acquaintance with John Henry Newman and his brother Frank. The former having walked over from Oxford, seventeen miles, to breakfast, and repeating Milman's beautiful hymn from the _Martyr of Antioch_, 'Brother, thou art gone before us.' "He was just twenty-four, and his brother Frank, who came soon after to assist Walter Mayers with his pupils ... was only twenty, but as bright a specimen of a young Oxford student as I had ever met with. They had both been considered converted in early youth, and so uncommon an event was it to me to meet with Christian young men" (men, that is, whose religion was their motive power, and not only used in the conventional and cold formality then usual in the case of so many families in England), "that my admiration knew no bounds. Of course, I told my sister Maria ... all this, and she was quite prepared to appreciate in like manner, when she went to stay at Worton the following summer." We come now to the time which, whether for happiness or regret, inevitably enters into the lives of most men on this earth--the time when they first meet "the Woman they Never Forget." It does not follow that they are able to marry her, but it _does_ follow that, meet whom they may later, no one will ever oust from her place that first woman in their memories. |
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