but to our love of
finding and embracing truth for ourselves, which is still nobler. People
who like their teacher to be as a king publishing decrees with herald
and trumpet, perhaps find Mr. Mill colourless. Yet this habitual
effacement of his own personality marked a delicate and very rare shade
in his reverence for the sacred purity of truth.

* * * * *

Meditation on the influence of one who has been the foremost instructor
of his time in wisdom and goodness quickly breaks off, in this hour when
his loss is fresh upon us; it changes into affectionate reminiscences
for which silence is more fitting. In such an hour thought turns rather
to the person than the work of the master whom we mourn. We recall his
simplicity, gentleness, heroic self-abnegation; his generosity in
encouraging, his eager readiness in helping; the warm kindliness of his
accost, the friendly brightening of the eye. The last time I saw him was
a few days before he left England.[1] He came to spend a day with me in
the country, of which the following brief notes happened to be written
at the time in a letter to a friend:--

'He came down by the morning train to Guildford station, where I
was waiting for him. He was in his most even and mellow humour. We
walked in a leisurely way and through roundabout tracks for some
four hours along the ancient green road which you know, over the
high grassy downs, into old chalk pits picturesque with juniper and
yew, across heaths and commons, and so up to our windy promontory,
where the majestic prospect stirred him with lively delight. You
know he is a fervent botanist, and every ten minutes he stooped to
look at this or that on the path. Unluckily I am ignorant of the
very rudiments of the matter, so his parenthetic enthusiasms were
lost upon me.

[Footnote 1: April 5, 1873.]

'Of course he talked, and talked well. He admitted that Goethe had added
new points of view to life, but has a deep dislike of his moral
character; wondered how a man who could draw the sorrows of a deserted
woman like Aurelia, in _Wilhelm Meister_, should yet have behaved so
systematically ill to women. Goethe tried as hard as he could to be a
Greek, yet his failure to produce anything perfect in form, except a few
lyrics, proves the irresistible expansion of the modern spirit, and the
inadequateness of the Greek type to modern needs of activity a