He had chanced to come to Williams’s room, and on Williams saying that he had no plan of reading for the approaching vacation, Keble said, “I am going to leave Oxford for good.  Suppose you come and read with me.  The Provost has asked me to take Wilberforce, and I declined; but if you would come, you would be companions.”  Keble was going down to Southrop, a little curacy near his father’s; there Williams joined him, with two more—­Robert Wilberforce and R.H.  Froude; and there the Long Vacation of 1823 was spent, and Isaac Williams’s character and course determined.  “It was this very trivial accident, this short walk of a few yards, and a few words spoken, which was the turning-point of my life.  If a merciful God had miraculously interposed to arrest my course, I could not have had a stronger assurance of His presence than I always had in looking back to that day.”  It determined Isaac Williams’s character, and it determined for good and all his theological position.  He had before him all day long in John Keble a spectacle which was absolutely new to him.  Ambitious as a rising and successful scholar at college, he saw a man, looked up to and wondered at by every one, absolutely without pride and without ambition.  He saw the most distinguished academic of his day, to whom every prospect was open, retiring from Oxford in the height of his fame to bury himself with a few hundreds of Gloucestershire peasants in a miserable curacy.  He saw this man caring for and respecting the ignorant and poor as much as others respected the great and the learned.  He saw this man, who had made what the world would call so great a sacrifice, apparently unconscious that he had made any sacrifice at all, gay, unceremonious, bright, full of play as a boy, ready with his pupils for any exercise, mental or muscular—­for a hard ride, or a crabbed bit of Aeschylus, or a logic fence with disputatious and paradoxical undergraduates, giving and taking on even ground.  These pupils saw one, the depth of whose religion none could doubt, “always endeavouring to do them good as it were unknown to themselves and in secret, and ever avoiding that his kindness should be felt and acknowledged”; showing in the whole course of daily life the purity of Christian love, and taking the utmost pains to make no profession or show of it.  This unostentatious and undemonstrative religion—­so frank, so generous in all its ways—­was to Isaac Williams “quite a new world.”  It turned his mind in upon itself in the deepest reverence, but also with something of morbid despair of ever reaching such a standard.  It drove all dreams of ambition out of his mind.  It made humility, self-restraint, self-abasement, objects of unceasing, possibly not always wise and healthy, effort.  But the result was certainly a character of great sweetness, tenderness, and lowly unselfishness, pure, free from all worldliness, and deeply resigned to the will of God.  He caught from Mr. Keble, like Froude, two characteristic habits of mind—­a strong