GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 351 



answered, with his usual severe candour, that he had 

 observed nothing in the slightest degree objectionable, 

 but that one such adventure would satisfy him for a 

 lifetime. 



The one art by which he was vividly affected was poetry. —| 

 The magic of romantic verse, which had taken him captive 

 in early boyhood, when he found it first in the pages of 

 Lara, never entirely lost its spell over him. Milton (though 

 with occasional qualms, because Paradise Lost was "tainted 

 with the Arian heresy "), Wordsworth, Gray, Cowper, and 

 Southey, were at his fingers' ends, and he had certain 

 favourite passages of each of these which he was never 

 weary of intoning. He liked Southey, because he was, as 

 he put it, " the best naturalist among the English poets," 

 and had described sea-anemones like a zoologist in Thalaba. 

 He was much more interested, towards the end, in portions 

 of Swinburne and Rossetti, than he had ever been in 

 Tennyson and Browning, for neither of whom he had the 

 slightest tolerance. Almost the latest conscious exercise of 

 my father's brain was connected with his love for poetry. 

 During his fatal illness, in July, 1888, when the gloom of 

 decay was creeping over his intellect, he was carried out for 

 a drive, the last which he would ever take, on an afternoon 

 of unusual beauty. We passed through the bright street of 

 Torquay, along the strand of Torbay, with its thin screen 

 of tamarisks between the roadway and the bay, up through 

 the lanes of Torre and Cockington. My father, with the 

 pathetic look in his eyes, the mortal pallor on his cheeks, 

 scarcely spoke, and seemed to observe nothing. But, 

 as we turned to drive back down a steep lane of over- 

 hanging branches, the pale vista of the sea burst upon 

 us, silvery blue in the yellow light of afternoon. Some- 

 thing in the beauty of the scene raised the sunken brain, 

 and with a little of the old declamatory animation in head 



