‘Froude’s first letter to Mr. Newman is in August, 1828. It is the letter of a friendly and sympathising colleague in College work, glad to be free from the “images of impudent undergraduates”; he inserts some lines of verse, talks about Dollond and telescopes, and relates how he and a friend got up at half-past two in the morning, and walked half a mile to see Mercury rise; he writes about his mathematical studies and reading for Orders, and how a friend had “read half through Prideaux and yet accuses himself of idleness”; but there is no interchange of intimate thought. Mr. Newman was at this time, as he has told us, drifting away from under the shadow of Liberalism; and in Froude he found a man who, without being a Liberal, was as quick-sighted, as courageous, and as alive to great thoughts and new hopes as himself. Very different in many ways, they were in this alike, that the commonplace notions of religion and the Church were utterly unsatisfactory to them, and that each had the capacity for affectionate and whole-hearted friendship. The friendship began and lasted on, growing stronger and deeper to the end. And this was not all. Froude’s friendship with Mr. Newman overcame Mr. Keble’s hesitations about Mr. Newman’s supposed Liberalism. Mr. Newman has put on record what he thought and felt about Froude: no one, probably, of the many whom Cardinal Newman’s long life has brought round him, ever occupied Froude’s place in his heart.[305] The correspondence shows in part the way in which Froude’s spirit rose, under the sense of having such a friend to work with, in the cause which, day by day, grew greater and more sacred in the eyes of both. Towards Mr. Keble Froude felt like a son to a father; towards Mr. Newman like a soldier to his comrade, and him the most splendid and boldest of warriors. Each mind caught fire from the other, till the high enthusiasm of the one was quenched in an early death.