did not care to take measure of its greater or
less importance. It was enough that a thing was to do, to be worth his
while to do it as if there was nothing else to be done in the world.
The cry of Laud and Wentworth was his, alike in small and great things;
and to no man was more applicable the German "Echt," which expresses
reality as well as thoroughness. The usual result followed, in all his
homes, of an absolute reliance on him for everything. Under every
difficulty, and in every emergency, his was the encouraging influence,
the bright and ready help. In illness, whether of the children or any of
the servants, he was better than a doctor. He was so full of resource,
for which every one eagerly turned to him, that his mere presence in the
sick-room was a healing influence, as if nothing could fail if he were
only there. So that at last, when, all through the awful night which
preceded his departure, he lay senseless in the room where he had
fallen, the stricken and bewildered ones who tended him found it
impossible to believe that what they saw before them alone was left, or
to shut out wholly the strange wild hope that he might again be suddenly
among them _like_ himself, and revive what they could not connect, even
then, with death's despairing helplessness.

It was not a feeling confined to the relatives whom he had thus taught
to have such exclusive dependence on him. Among the consolations
addressed to those mourners came words from one whom in life he had most
honoured, and who also found it difficult to connect him with death, or
to think that he should never see that blithe face anymore. "It is
almost thirty years," Mr. Carlyle wrote, "since my acquaintance with him
began; and on my side, I may say, every new meeting ripened it into more
and more clear discernment of his rare and great worth as a brother
man: a most cordial, sincere, clear-sighted, quietly decisive, just and
loving man: till at length he had grown to such a recognition with me as
I have rarely had for any man of my time. This I can tell you three, for
it is true and will be welcome to you: to others less concerned I had as
soon _not_ speak on such a subject." "I am profoundly sorry, for _you_,"
Mr. Carlyle at the same time wrote to me; "and indeed for myself and for
us all. It is an event world-wide; a _unique_ of talents suddenly
extinct; and has 'eclipsed,' we too may say, 'the harmless gaiety of
nations.' No death since 1866 has fallen on