Soon after his return home, he was offered the college living of Elton, in Huntingdonshire, and at first declined it, but afterward, for a reason which curiously illustrates his conscientiousness, he determined to accept. "My chief rock of offence," said he, "is the subduing the poet to the priest." He would have given up poetry altogether, but Keble convinced him that he had no right to bury his chief talent in a napkin. To cultivate it in moderation was more difficult, and here he thought the uncongenial duties of the pastoral office would be a great help in correcting his inordinate love of literature, and keeping him within the bounds of usefulness. "I do not say you are wrong," was Wordsworth's remark on hearing his determination; "but England loses a poet."
If his reason for accepting the rectory was a strange one, his first step on taking possession was still stranger and still wiser. He determined to visit Rome and study the method pursued by the church in dealing with the souls committed to her care. "I want to go to Italy," said he, "not as a poet, or a tourist, or a pleased dreamer, but as a pilgrim who regards it as a second Palestine, the Holy Land of the West." Dr. Wiseman, then coadjutor bishop of the central district of England, gave him letters of introduction to Cardinal Acton and Dr. Grant at Rome, so that he was enabled to see much more of the charitable and religious institutions of the Christian capital than falls to the lot of the ordinary visitor. He studied Italian, in order that he might understand the numerous lives of saints in that language, and singularly enough, or providentially we should rather say, he conceived a particular devotion to St. Philip Neri, his future father. Of his visit to the room in which the saint used to say Mass he writes, "How little did I, a Protestant stranger in that room years ago, dream that I should ever be of the saint's family, or that the Oratorian father who showed it me should in a few years be appointed by the pope the novice-master of the English Oratorians. I remember how, when he kissed the glass of the case in which St. Philip's little bed is kept as a relic, he apologized to me as a Protestant, lest I should be scandalized, and told me with a smile how tenderly St. Philip's children loved their father. I was not scandalized with their relic-worship then, but I can understand better now what he said about the love, the child-like love, wherewith St. Philip inspired his sons. If any one had told me that in seven short years I should wear the same habit, and the same white collar in the streets of London, and be preaching a triduo in honor of Rome's apostle, I should have wondered how any one could dream so wild a dream."