RESIDENCE IN LONDON. 47 



led him to open his heart, or some fresh fact or idea kindled 

 his enthusiasm, and impelled him to look for sympathy in 

 the old Bristol home. The press of affairs often drove the 

 returning birthday from his mind till he wrote the date, 

 and the recollection of brother or sister surged up in his 

 consciousness, and prompted his pen. The following 

 passage from a letter to his sister Mary, shows the attitude 

 of his thought to the memory of the great bereavement 

 which had never long been absent from her imagination. 

 It was written on her birthday, but it would arrive on the 

 anniversary of her father's death, a day 



that must be felt by all of us to be one of deep interest, 

 though lime modifies the painful part of the associations con- 

 nected with it, and makes us dwell (or, rather, should do so) on 

 the mutual happiness we enjoy as a family, notwithstanding our 

 diversity of tastes and pursuits. . . . The memory of our dear 

 father should not be to any of us, I think, associated with pain- 

 ful feelings, even when thus specially recalled ; for we can all 

 feel that we are occupied as he would approve, and carrying out 

 in our various modes the objects in which he was most deeply 

 interested. And while we may all of us at times regret the loss 

 of his counsel and guidance, yet we may also feel that if it had 

 been longer continued to us, we might either by resting too 

 much upon it have too little cultivated our own self-reliance, or, 

 on the other hand, carried as we have been into circumstances 

 in which he could not follow us, we might have been often led 

 to give him pain, by preferring our own judgment to his. Affec- 

 tion never dies, though it may sleep ; and whether he be or be 

 not at present regarding us with love, I no more think of his 

 love as lost to us, than I do of that of my wife or children as 

 extinguished when they are asleep. 



A year or two later he steals a few minutes from the 

 rush of business to announce to the same sister a discovery 

 among the Foraminifcra at which he has been so long 

 working. 



