no himself to know what the Quakers meant
in what they said and did." He referred me to an article of his on
Jacob Boehme and the mystic writers, in which he had given his views
in regard to Fox.

We talked about his parish work: he found it, he said, a great help to
him, adding emphatically that his other labor was secondary to this.
He had trained himself not to be annoyed by his people calling on him
when he was writing. If he was to be their priest, he must see them
when it suited them to come; and he had become able if called off from
his writing to go on again the moment he was alone. I asked him when
he wrote. He said in the morning almost always: sometimes, when much
pushed, he had written for an hour in the evening, but he always had
to correct largely the next morning work thus done. Daily exercise,
riding, hunting, together with parish work, were necessary to keep him
in a condition for writing: he aimed to keep himself in rude health.
I asked whether _Alton Locke_ had been written in that room. "Yes," he
said--"from four to eight in the mornings; and a young man was staying
with me at the time with whom every day I used to ride, or perhaps
hunt, when my task of writing was done."

A fine copy of St. Augustine attracted my attention on his
shelves--five volumes folio bound in vellum. "Ah," he said, "that _is_
a treasure I must show you;" and taking down a volume he turned to the
fly-leaf, where were the words "Charles Kingsley from Thomas Carlyle,"
and above them "Thomas Carlyle from John Sterling." One could
understand that Carlyle had thus handed on the book, notwithstanding
its sacred associations, knowing that to Kingsley it would have a
threefold value. My eye caught also a relic of curious interest--a
fragment from one of the vessels of the Spanish Armada. It lay on the
mantelpiece: I could well understand Kingsley's pleasure in possessing
it.

At the breakfast-table the next morning we had much talk in regard to
American writers. Kingsley admitted Emerson's high merit, but thought
him too fragmentary a writer and thinker to have enduring fame. He had
meant that this should be implied as his opinion in the title he gave
to _Phaethon_--"Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers"--a book he had
written in direct opposition to what he understood to be the general
teaching of Emerson. I remarked upon the great beauty of some of
Emerson's later writings and the marvelous clearness of insight which
was shown in h