LITERARY WORK IN LONDON. 207 



more common, even among my father's own family, than 

 for a person who approached him with the design of asking 

 a question or making a remark, to hesitate, scared by his 

 apparent austerity. No one can doubt that, without in- 

 tending to be so, he was often not a Httle awe-inspiring. 

 This was partly caused by his introspective habit of mind, 

 self-contained in meditation ; partly also by his extreme 

 timidity, w^hich found a shelter under this severe and 

 awful mien. Very often, when the person who approached 

 him wondered whether those oracular lips would fulminate, 

 the oracle himself w^as only speculating how soon he could 

 flee away into his study and be at rest. The air of 

 severity was increased by the habit of brushing his straight 

 black hair tightly away from the forehead ; it w^as occa- 

 sionally removed by a cloud of immeasurable tenderness 

 passing across the great brown lustrous orbs of his eyes. 

 His smile was rare, but when it came it was exquisite.* 



That his standard, both for himself and others, w^as high, 

 and that his manner towards an offender could be formi- 

 dable, it would be easy to prove. x-\t this juncture one 

 striking example may suffice. One of the difficulties of 

 the Moravian mission at Bluefields had been the unalter- 

 able prejudice against treating the negroes as exact 

 equals with white men and women. It was especially 

 hard to overcome the feeling of shame and repulsion with 

 which West Indian society regarded the idea of mixed 

 marriages between whites and blacks. To the Moravians, 

 however, it appeared that no difference should be made 

 when the Church had received members of the two races 



* A very remarkable accidental portrait of my father, as he looked when he 

 was about sixty years of age, exists in the museum at Brussels. Philip Gosse 

 might have sat for the man, holding a crimson missal, who kneels in the lelt- 

 hand wing of the triptych, by Bernard van Orley (No. 40 in the Catalogue), 

 except that the nose is too large and flat. The eyes and mouth, the general 

 form of the face, and the colour of the skin are marvellously identical. 



