MY LITERARY WORK 103 



Westminster Abbey, as one of the pall-bearers, along with 

 nine of his most distinguished friends or admirers, among 

 whom were J. Russell Lowell as the representative of American 

 science and literature. Among the many obituary notices of 

 Darwin, that by Huxley (in Nature, of April 27), is one of 

 the shortest, most discriminating, and most beautiful. It is 

 published also in the second volume of his " Collected Essays." 

 For those who have not read this true and charming estimate 

 of his friend, I may quote one passage: " One could not con- 

 verse with Darwin without being reminded of Socrates. There 

 was the same desire to find some one wiser than himself; the 

 same belief in the sovereignty of reason ; the same ready 

 humour; the same sympathetic interest in all the ways and 

 works of men. But instead of turning away from the problems 

 of nature as wholly insoluble, our modern philosopher devoted 

 his whole life to attacking them in the spirit of Heraclitus and 

 Democritus, with results which are as the substance of which 

 their speculations were anticipatory shadows." 



In the year 1881 I removed to Godalming, where I had 

 built a small cottage near the water-tower and at about the 

 same level as the Charterhouse School. We had been partly 

 induced to come here to be near my very old friend Mr. 

 Charles Hayward, whom I had first known during my 

 residence at Neath about forty years before. He was living 

 with his nephew, the late C. F. Hayward, a well-known archi- 

 tect, whose children were about the same age as my own. 

 We found here some very pleasant friends among the masters 

 at Charterhouse School, as well as among residents who had 

 come to the place for its general educational advantages or 

 for the charm of its rural scenery. We had here about half 

 an acre of ground with oak trees and hazel bushes (from 

 which I named our place " Nutwood Cottage"), and during 

 the eight years we lived there I thoroughly enjoyed making 

 a new garden, in which, and a small greenhouse, I cultivated 

 at one time or another more than a thousand species of 

 plants. The soil was a deep bed of the lower green-sand 

 formation, with a thin surface layer of leaf-mould, and it was 



