"I did say yes," he would acknowledge, trembling at the memory of it, when "at lightning and lashed rod" God heard him, "truer than tongue, confess / Thy terror, O Christ, O God." But was that confession a cry of surrender, or the cry of someone unable any longer to hold back the stress of something surging through the very marrow of his soul? It would be the beginning too of his realization that he would have to give up remaining where he was, on ground he understood - the symbolic remembrance of Christ in the Eucharist - because that way of seeing things was no longer enough. He would come to hunger after nothing less than the Real Presence, God actually indwelling in things as simple as bread and wine, and see it as the logical extension of God's indwelling among us, pitching His tent in the desert of ourselves so that He could speak to us as He had with Moses in the tent.

Two look at the world around them. One thinks of oil or gold or another human being and puts a value on it or him or her. Another looks at the world and sees news of God's presence calling. Or two look at a piece of bread or a cup of wine and see bread or wine only - the quotidian, the physical thing itself, while another looks at the same two things and is shaken to the very core by the God-saturated reality brimming in the deepest self. And these ways of seeing come to make all the difference in one's life, one's thoughts, even in the way one comes to taste words.

And so with Hopkins, who for complex reasons needed, he felt, to become a Catholic and (better, worse) a Jesuit priest. Neither choice could possibly lead to preferment or even acceptance in his world, the world of late Victorian England. But they were - those choices - the logical outcome for him of much deep thinking and soul-searching. It would mean going counter to the secular and agnostic cutting-edge thinking of his own day, whether that thinker was Hegel or Lyell, Darwin or Freud. It would mean creating a radically new idiom that would lead to the renewal and possibilities of English, giving it back something of its original Anglo-Saxon force, besides recovering anew the all-but-forgotten beauties of plainchant. It would mean a poetry lettered and saturated with a language shimmering with the possibilities of a sacramental vision of the world around us. It would come to mean the possibility of actually renewing both the world and its words.

So give it a day, a date, a going forth, a crossing over, all in an instant, finally, a yes and a yes again. Call it Wednesday, July 18, 1866. Call it an out-of-the way point somewhere south of London and name it Horsham, on a dull midsummer's day with curds-and-whey clouds faintly appearing and disappearing. Call it what he would with its wondrous, irresistible forces working on him. The instress of it, like the ooze of virgin oil crushed in the presence of God's hands, an anointing, a yes.

(from Paul Mariani's Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life. Such a wonderful book.)