life, which began to appear to them too narrow for the facts of life.
_Wilhelm Meister_, read in Carlyle's translation at the same time,
exercised a similar liberating and enchanting power upon my father.
The social enthusiasms of George Sand also affected him greatly,
strengthening whatever he had inherited of his father's generous
discontent with an iron world, where the poor suffer too much and
work too hard. And this discontent, when the time came for him to
leave Oxford, assumed a form which startled his friends.

He had done very well at Oxford, taking his two Firsts with ease, and
was offered a post in the Colonial Office immediately on leaving the
University. But the time was full of schemes for a new heaven and a new
earth, wherein should dwell equality and righteousness. The storm of
1848 was preparing in Europe; the Corn Laws had fallen; the Chartists
were gathering in England. To settle down to the old humdrum round of
Civil Service promotion seemed to my father impossible. This revolt of
his, and its effect upon his friends, of whom the most intimate was
Arthur Clough, has left its mark on Clough's poem, the "Vacation
Pastoral," which he called "The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich," or, as it
runs in my father's old battered copy which lies before me,
"Tober-na-Fuosich." The Philip of the poem, the dreamer and democrat,
who says to Adam the Tutor--

Alas, the noted phrase of the prayer-book
Doing our duty in that state of life to which God has called us,
Seems to me always to mean, when the little rich boys say it,
Standing in velvet frock by Mama's brocaded flounces,
Eying her gold-fastened book, and the chain and watch at her bosom,
Seems to me always to mean, Eat, drink, and never mind others--