t have emulated Howard or Miss Fry, and have gone into the realms of
destitution to relieve its wrongs. He was extremely fastidious, and
anything that offended his taste by vulgarity or crudeness repelled
him with such force that the work of practical philanthropy would have
been impossible to his temperament. The indolence I have above spoken
of--which must not be confounded with slothfulness, but is, as the
true meaning of the word indicates, the following of the dictates of
the temperament, whether in activity or rest--led him to contemplation
rather than action.

The refined idealism of his nature, made more subtle by the indulgence
of an idolizing circle of relatives and friends, who saw in him the
promise of more even than he ever attained, or than was possible to
the smooth prosperity of his life, made it impossible for him to
thrust himself into the social conflicts, whether of poverty or of
politics, though the finest and most exalted passages of his work
were not so fine and exalted as his personality; he was better than
anything he ever wrote, and this is understood by all who knew him,
and that what he wrote was only the overflow of a mind which never
needed a stimulus to divine cogitation. The fascination, the subtle
personal glamour he unconsciously threw over those who came in true
contact with him, made them always expect more than he accomplished,
for in that there was not even the stimulus of ambition. What he did
was done with the spontaneousness of the wind or the sunshine. If he
had a vanity, it was to be in all points accoutred for his place in
society; but even this was so lightly held that few knew him well
enough to see it, and it was never a motive power in him.

Knowing all his earlier work before I knew him, I thought I detected a
want of that profounder sympathy with humanity and the pathos of life
which comes from actual suffering, and I remember saying to one of his
admirers, before I saw him, that what he wanted to make him a great
poet was suffering. This he had gained somewhat of when I made his
acquaintance. His wife had died not long before I went to Cambridge to
see him and to enlist his assistance in "The Crayon," and he was in
the earliest phase of the reaction from a sorrow which had made him
insist on solitude. All his surroundings had kept up the impressions
of his bereavement, and all his associates sympathized with and
respected it, and I came in with a new life just as he ca