to have them so abruptly shaken together. Love is an idle sort of a
god, and comes in other hours than the working ones; at least I have
always found it so. I don't think of it in my working time, and when
I see a person I do love working (at whatever it may be), I have
quite another set of thoughts about her. . . It would do excellently
well for married affection, for it is the element in which it lives.
But I don't think young love gets born then. I only speak for
myself, and from a very limited experience. As to the story, I don't
the least object to it on The Spectator's ground. I think it could
not have been done in prose. Verse was wanted to give it dignity.
But if we find it trivial, the fault is in our own varnished selves.
We have been polished up so bright that we forget the stuff we are
made of."

Clough was in politics a Republican, and sympathised ardently with
the French Revolution of 1848. So did Charles Kingsley, a Cambridge
man, who was at that time on a visit to Exeter. But Kingsley, though
a disciple of Carlyle, was also a hard-working clergyman, who held
that the masses could be regenerated by Christian Socialism. Froude
had no faith in Socialism, nor in Christianity as the Church
understood it. In this year, 1848, Emerson also came to Oxford, and
dined with Clough at Oriel, where they thought him like Newman.
Froude was already an admirer of Emerson's essays, and laid his case
before the American moralist. Emerson gave him, as might have been
expected, no practical advice, but recommended him to read the
Vedas. Nothing mattered much to Emerson, who took the opportunity to
give a lecture in London on the Spiritual Unity of all Animated
Beings. Froude attended it, and there first saw Carlyle, who burst,
characteristically enough, into a shout of laughter at the close.
Carlyle loved Emerson; but the Emersonian philosophy was to him like