( 2 7 I ) 



CHAPTER X. 

 LITERARY WORK IN DEVONSHIRE. 

 1 857-1 864. 



THE death of Emily Gosse marked a crisis in the 

 career of her husband. None of the customary- 

 expressions which are used to denote the grief and despair 

 of a bereaved person are applicable in his case. He 

 showed few outward signs of distress. His faith in God, 

 his implicit confidence that what was called the death 

 of the redeemed was but a passage from the ante- 

 chamber of life to its recesses, to that radiant inner room 

 into which he also would presently be ushered, removed 

 the bitterness of separation. He was not tortured by that 

 desiderium, that insatiable and hopeless longing, which saps 

 the vitality of those who have loved, and lost, and do not 

 hope to regain. Yet when faith, with its clearest and 

 fullest vision, has done all it can to comfort, nature will 

 assert itself, and grief takes other forms. My father was 

 now completing his forty-seventh year, and had reached 

 an age when the first eagerness of life is over, and when 

 sympathy and encouragement are necessary, if the strenuous 

 effort is to be maintained. It is probable that he did not 

 realize at once, in his determination to be at peace, in his 

 violent subjection to the will of God, how much had been 

 taken away from his power of sustaining an active 

 intellectual life. He survived to recover his happiness, to 



