As to Church matters. I think people in general concern themselves less
with them than they did when you left England. Certainly religion is
not, to all appearance at least, losing ground here: but since the great
people of Newman's party went over, the disputes among the comparatively
unimportant remains of them do not excite much interest. I am going to
hear Manning at the Spanish Chapel next Sunday. Newman gives himself up
almost entirely to organizing and educating the Roman Catholics, and is
gone off greatly, they say, as a preacher.

God bless you, my dearest Tom: I cannot tell you the almost painful
longing I sometimes have to see you once more.

The following year the brothers met again; and there followed, almost
immediately, my uncle's election to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford.
He writes, in answer to my father's congratulations:

HAMPTON, _May 16, 1857._

MY DEAR TOM,--My thoughts have often turned to you during my canvass
for the Professorship--and they have turned to you more than ever
during the last few days which I have been spending at Oxford. You
alone of my brothers are associated with that life at Oxford, the
_freest_ and most delightful part, perhaps, of my life, when with
you and Clough and Walrond I shook off all the bonds and
formalities of the place, and enjoyed the spring of life and that
unforgotten Oxfordshire and Berkshire country. Do you remember a
poem of mine called "The Scholar Gipsy"? It was meant to fix the
remembrance of those delightful wanderings of ours in the Cumner
hills before they were quite effaced--and as such Clough and