XXI 



before his assembled friends and pupils in a speech of touching 

 simplicity and eloquence a lasting and truthful survey of the 

 lifework he had been enabled to accomplish. " I may be thank- 

 ful," he concluded, "for the life granted me. I stand here 

 comparatively strong, and also ready to do what may be given 

 me to do. I stand here, having reviewed my life, and having seen 

 how manifold were the advantages that have been allotted to me. 

 All this makes me grateful, fervently grateful, especially to the 

 Eternal Source of all that exists, of which it is not given to man a 

 speck in the infinite space, a breath in the infinite time to form an 

 idea ; he can do no more than bow reverently in absolute submission. 

 This submission has been asked of me more than once. I hope also 

 to find the strength to submit to what may be required of me in the 

 future." 



Some sorrowful bereavements had indeed befallen him : in the loss, 

 in 1870, of his only child Marie, after giving birth to twins ; and 

 more recently, in 1886, of the beloved and admirable partner of many 

 years, after a long and distressing illness, through which he had 

 nursed her with the tenderest assiduity. But he remained steadfast 

 and full of trust, and he had many compensations. The retrospect 

 of his life was happy ; his contemporaries loved and honoured him 

 as few men have been loved and honoured, recognising in him in a 

 rare degree the possession and harmonious, fruitful, and lifelong 

 exercise of some of the greatest and best attributes that can adorn 

 human nature. 



The last illness of Donders was sudden, as his father's had been, 

 and in him, too, it was the circulation of the brain that failed. That 

 powerful organ of sweetest feeling, high aspiration, and self-restrained 

 will, which had enabled him to accomplish so much, even measuring 

 for us the velocity of thought, was now itself to give way. He had 

 come on a visit to England in October, 1888, and seemed to be 

 supremely happy in the renewal of his domestic life. Most interest- 

 ing was it to listen to the themes he opened as to the work he might 

 soon undertake in the studio of his refined home, tracing the springs 

 of Art to their most secret source in the very constitution of man's 

 bodily organisation, subject in all respects to the conditions and 

 limitations imposed by physiological laws. The operations of these 

 laws he had long delighted to track out to their remotest conse- 

 quences, and to communicate his conclusions to masters in art of the 

 quality of his friends Sir Fred. W. Burton and G. F. Watts. His 

 studies had always inclined him in this direction, and he now hoped 

 to execute a design he had long cherished, of illustrating his concep- 

 tions and views by reference to the life of Leonardo da Vinci, the 

 great artist with a scientific turn of mind, to whose figure he had 

 ever felt himself especially attracted. In such a field, had his days 



