Admirers of Hopkins’ writings may be excused for reacting with embarrassment to the frequency with which this poet of the new and the strange so often falls back, as though at a loss for a more beautiful word, on the tired and adulterated word ‘beautiful’. Surprisingly few references to the beautiful are to be found in the writings of Fransciscan Scotus, and he shows little interest in including Beauty along with Unity, Goodness, Truth and pairs like Finite-Infinite, and so on, in his list of transcendentals. One sometimes wishes that Hopkins had followed suit. Hopkins himself sometimes expressed this wish. He ached ‘to give up beauty’ when the beautiful began to be especially associated by him with the liturgy of the Oxford Movement that he was soon to forsake. The beautiful was therefore also associated with his Puseyite protégé Digby Mackworth Dolben who was destined soon to forsake Hopkins. Dolben suffered death by drowning at the age of nineteen. Among the poems by him that were edited by Robert Bridges, is one that begins: ‘Beautiful, oh beautiful –’

John Austin pleads that, instead of spending so much time analysing the word ‘beautiful’, philosophers should give more attention to other words of aesthetic commendation like ‘dainty’ and ‘dumpy’. This, he goes on to say (without pausing to wonder whether these two also are names for transcendentals), would go some way to diminishing what his philosophical contemporary John Passmore condemned as ‘the dreariness of aesthetics’. Readers of Hopkins’ prose may be excused in particular for wishing that he had applied his inventiveness to the search for substitutes for the b-word in some of the places where he uses it, for example where in his journal he writes: