GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 333 



and the wickedness of the sheep in refusing to return 

 seemed almost inconceivable. 



The reader cannot but have already observed how 

 few and how ephemeral were my father's intimate 

 friendships with those whose station, tastes, and acquire- 

 ments might have been supposed to tally with his own. 

 In the world of literature and science he scarcely kept 

 up a single close acquaintanceship. Of friendship as a 

 cardinal virtue, as one of the great elements in a happy life, 

 he had no conception. He could make none of those 

 concessions, those mutual acceptances of the inevitable, 

 without which this, the most spiritual of the passions, 

 cannot exist. Even those who were most strongly 

 attracted to him, fell off at last from the unyielding surface 

 of his conscience ; this was the secret of his brief and 

 truncated intimacy with Edward Forbes, whom he had 

 seemed to love so well. The ardent patience and sym- 

 pathy of Charles Kingsley, the friend from the outer world 

 whom he preserved longest, wearied at length of an 

 intercourse in which principles were ever preferred to 

 persons. In later years one example may suffice. Dora 

 Greenwell precipitated herself on the friendship of Philip 

 Gosse with an impetuosity which at first bore everything 

 before it, and in a copious correspondence laid open to 

 him her spiritual ardours and aspirations. He was 

 gratified, he was touched, but to respond was impossible 

 to him ; he had the same purely didactic touch, the same 

 logic, the same inelasticity for every one, and friendship 

 soon expired in such a vacuum. A phrase in a letter to 

 myself gives its own key to the social isolation of his life. 

 " I am impatient and intolerant," he writes, " of all resist- 

 ance to what I see to be the will of God, and if that 

 resistance is sustained, I have no choice but to turn away 

 from him who resists." 



