unphilosophical
for a philosopher so young as generally to take upon oath any words
of so great a master. Kenelm thought that the root of all private
benevolence, of all enlightened advance in social reform, lay in the
adverse theorem,--that in every man's nature there lies a something
that, could we get at it, cleanse it, polish it, render it visibly clear
to our eyes, would make us love him. And in this spontaneous, uncultured
sympathy with the results of so many laborious struggles of his own
scholastic intellect against the dogma of the German giant, he felt as
if he had found a younger--true, but oh, how much more subduing, because
so much younger--sister of his own man's soul. Then came, so strongly,
the sense of her sympathy with his own strange innermost self, which a
man will never feel more than once in his life with a daughter of
Eve, that he dared not trust himself to speak. He somewhat hurried his
leave-taking.

Passing in the rear of the garden towards the bridge which led to his
lodging, he found on the opposite bank, at the other end of the bridge,
Mr. Algernon Sidney Gale Jones peacefully angling for trout.

"Will you not try the stream to-day, sir? Take my rod." Kenelm
remembered that Lily had called Izaak Walton's book "a cruel one," and
shaking his head gently, went his way into the house. There he seated
himself silently by the window, and looked towards the grassy lawn
and the dipping willows, and the gleam of the white walls through the
girdling trees, as he had looked the eve before.

"Ah!" he murmured at last, "if, as I hold, a man but tolerably good
does good unconsciously merely by the act of living,--if he can no more
traverse his way from the cradle to the grave, without letting fall,
as he passes, the germs of strength, fertility, and beauty, than can a
reckless wind or a vagrant bird, which, where it passes, leaves behind
it the oak, the corn-sheaf, or the flower,--ah, if that be so, how
tenfold the good must be, if the man find the gentler and purer
duplicate of his own being in that mysterious, undefinable union which
Shakspeares and day-labourers equally agree to call love; which Newton
never recognizes, and which Descartes (his only rival in the realms
of thought at once severe and imaginative) reduces into links of early
association, explaining that he loved women who squinted, because, when
he was a boy, a girl with that infirmity squinted at him from the other
side of his father'