6 Concernmg Kingsleys in General \ 



loved him, as all did who had even the slightest 

 personal acquaintance with him, to squander alike 

 brilliant talents and brilliant opportunities without 

 attaining happiness. Yet he wrote Geoffrey Hamlyn 

 and Ravenshoe ; in these two great novels, and in 

 all his subsequent writings, the current of action is 

 less impetuous than in the works of Charles Kingsley, 

 and they contain no description of scenery that can 

 vie with the glowing word pictures of Westward Ho ! 

 They appear to owe their wonderful charm to the 

 perfectly genuine, unaffected sentiment which they 

 display, to the bright stream of genial humour which 

 runs through almost every page of them, and to the 

 fact that the mind of their writer seems ever to be 

 imbued with the idea that the cords of sympathy by 

 which man is bound to his fellow-man can never be 

 completely torn asunder. But that Henry Kingsley 

 had in him the bold, adventurous spirit of his race 

 is proved by his record, and that he also loved 

 Nature not less deeply than his brother Charles is 

 proved by his paintings : paintings almost unknown 

 outside his family, but which, though they are the 

 works of an amateur, are yet so beautiful that they 

 could only have been made by a man who looked 

 on the beauty of the external world with the eye 

 of a worshipper. Charles Kingsley loved Nature so 

 keenly that he was forced to sing and paint in words 

 her charms, but not enough to make him sacrifice 

 to this love his duty to the toilers in the city and 

 his work as a parson. Henry loved Nature so keenly 



