272 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



be more happy, perhaps, than ever before, but he never 

 entirely regained his energy. From this year forward he 

 was retrenching, suppressing, withdrawing his forces, and 

 preparing for the long-drawn seclusion of his later years. 



Although my mother had shared his views on all 

 religious questions, and although on several occasions my 

 father has noted that she stirred the embers of his zeal 

 and quickened his conscience — " a very blessed revival of 

 my own soul through some words which she spoke to me " — 

 she had, nevertheless, an influence over him which was, on 

 the whole, opposed to the stern and fanatic tendency of 

 his own native temperament. Her mind was a singularly 

 gay and cheerful one, and no one could distinguish more 

 clearly than she did between piety and misanthropy. She 

 was also liberal in her mental judgments, ardent and 

 curious in her reception of new ideas ; without pretending 

 to enter into the details of physiological speculation, she 

 was inclined to welcome novelty, rather than to reject it. 

 The volumes which my father published during the last 

 five years of her life show, unless I am greatly mistaken, 

 how wholesome was her influence upon his mind in these 

 two directions. Nothing could be more cheerful than 

 the Devonshire Coast, while Tenby is positively playful. 

 Nor in any of these books, or in the monographs of a more 

 technical nature which accompanied them, is there betrayed 

 any want of sympathy with the progress of zoological 

 thought, or suspicion of its tendency, although the principles 

 of Biblical theology are boldly and frequently maintained. 

 With Edward Forbes and Charles Darwin he was in 

 correspondence, and was exchanging with them memoranda 

 which more and more directly tended to strengthen 

 evolutionary ideas. In some of the monographs on the 

 class of zoophytes which Philip Gosse issued in 1855 and 

 1856, passages are to be found which show the author to 



