The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Gerard Manley Hopkins

hurdle strained by leaning against; then there is the faint honey smell and in the mouth the sweet gum when you bite them.…

       1872

      March 13. After a time of trial and especially a morning in which I did not know which way to turn as the account of De Rancé’s final conversion was being read at dinner the verse Qui confidunt in D[omin]o sicut mons Sion¹⁴ which satisfied him and resolved him to enter his abbey of La Trappe by the mercy of God came strongly home to me too, so that I was choked for a little while and could not keep back my tears.…

      July 19. The ovary of the blown foxglove surrounded by the green calyx is perhaps that conventional flower in pointed and other floriated work which I could not before identify. It might also be St. John’s-wort.

      Stepped into a barn of ours, a great shadowy barn, where the hay had been stacked on either side, and looking at the great rudely arched timberframes – principals (?) and tie-beams, which make them look like bold big A’s with the cross-bar high up – I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again.…

      After the examinations we went for our holiday out to Douglas in the Isle of Man Aug. 3. At this time I had first begun to get hold of the copy of Scotus on the Sentences¹⁵ in the Baddely¹⁶ library and was flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm. It may come to nothing or it may be a mercy from God. But just then when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus.