Miscellaneous Papers

* that its brief record of his having been stricken from among men should be written by the old comrade and b

hill M

Club, when he told me that he had been in bed three days — that, after these attacks, he was troubled with cold shiverings, “which quite took the power of work out of him

im more tenderly than by two or three that start out of the crowd, when he unexpectedly presented himself in my room, announcing how that some passage in a certain book had made him cry yesterday, and how that he had come to dinner, “because he couldn’t help it”,

g his art, which was not good for the art that he held in trust. But, when we fell upon these topics, it was never very gravely, and I h

thy with the weak and lowly. He read the paper most pathetically, and with a simplicity of tenderness that certainly moved one of his audience to tears. This was presently after his standing for Oxford, from which place he had dispatched his agent to me, with a droll note (to which he afterwards added a verbal postscript), urging me to “come down a

where my eldest son then was, whether I felt as he did in regard of never seeing a boy without wanting instantly to give him a sovereign? I though

be encountered on this earth, that the mind first turns in a bereavement. And greater things that are known of him, in the way

pen had ever gone astray or done amiss, he had caused it

foolish fanc

that, striking,

that he’d wi

nesses of human nature, of his delightful playfulness as an essayist, of his quaint and touching ballads, of his mastery over the English language. Least of all

was in the healthiest vigour of his powers when he wrought on this last labour. In respect of earnest feeling, far-seeing purpose, character, incident, and a certain loving picturesqueness blending the whole, I believe it to be much the best of all his works. That he fully meant it to be so, that he had become strongly attached to it, and that he bestowed great pains upon it, I trace in almost every page. It contains one picture which must have cost him extreme distress, and which is a masterpiece. There are two children in it, touched with a hand as loving

often taken them out of his pocket here and there, for patient revision and interlineation. The last words he corrected in print were, “And my heart throbbed with an exquisite bliss”. GOD grant that on that Christmas Eve when he laid his head back o

enty-fourth of December 1863. He was only in his fifty-third year; so young a man that the mother who blessed hi

rise splendid Came blushing o’er the sea; I thought, as day was breaking, M

ther lying dead. In those twenty years of companionship with him they had learned much

ngle the dust to which the mortal part of him had returned, with that of a third child, lost in her infancy years