Two years after his conversion from High Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism Hopkins wrote in a letter dated 12 February 1868 sent from the Oratory School at Edgbaston to Alexander Baillie: ‘I find myself in an even prostrate admiration of Aristotle and am of the way of thinking, so far as I know him or know about him, that he is the end-all and be-all of philosophy.’ A different conversion is marked in a letter dated 20 February 1875 which Hopkins addressed to Robert Bridges from Saint Beuno's College near Saint Asaph (Llanelwy) in North Wales:

‘However this is me, not you.’ On the one hand this could be a commonplace sentence used to convey the letter writer's realisation that it is time he stopped talking about himself and showed more interest, or more than interest, in the addressee. On the other hand it could sound somewhat strange. It could sound strange either because it sounds like a tautology, and therefore seems not to need saying, or it could sound strange because what it means is too deep for words. It reminds us of the poet-priest's searching paragraphs, composed five years after this letter to Bridges, on the text Homo creatus est. These paragraphs begin by saying that during the retreat he has been making in the summer of that year at Liverpool, ‘I have been thinking about creation.’