When Johnson passed on to New College, Oxford, he was scarcely the usual freshman. He had written and had written well; already a curious maturity of intellect was united to that curious youthfulness of physique which endured even to the end. Several of his published poems date as far back as 1887, 1885, even 1883, albeit their author was but little inclined to rest upon these tentative laurels. The educational process seems to have been in the nature of a triumphal march all along for Lionel Johnson, and the poem "Oxford Nights" is a charming commentary upon his early love of the classics—"dear human books" to him, and nowise formidable. In spite of all this, he very nearly missed his first degree because only one member of the entire examining board could decipher his handwriting!
Shortly after attaining his majority, Lionel Johnson was received into the Catholic Church. The step implied no sudden change of faith, for he would seem to have been Catholic almost from the first by right of intuitive yearning. His instinct was all for legitimacy and orderly development on the one side—on the other, all for the mystical and unworldly, for the human fired with a touch of the divine: and it is this very inevitability which imparts such grace to the story. Here was the return of a son into the arms of his Mother, a great yet simple act; and, beyond a prayer that his beloved England might so return to allegiance, Lionel appeared quite unconscious that the matter could be made one of controversy. It is said that about this time he had thoughts of entering the priesthood. In his "Vigils" (written at Oxford in 1887), one recognises a spiritual concentration very like that of the young Crashaw, lone watcher "beneath Tertullian's roof of angels":
