216 BULLETIN OP THE 



its sensibilities ; by children, who saw in the simplicity of his 

 unspoiled nature a geniality and a kindliness which were akin to 

 their own. A French thinker has said that a meaure qu^on a 

 plus d'esprit on irouve quHl y a plus d'hommea origivaux. It 

 was the breadth and catholicity of Henry's intelligence which 

 enabled him to find something unique and characteristic in per- 

 sons who were flat, stale, and unprofitable to the average mind. 



Gifted with a mental constitution which was " feelingly alive 

 to each fine impulse," he possessed a high degree of aesthetic 

 sensibility to the beautiful in nature atid in art. It cannot be 

 doubted that a too exclusive addiction to the analytic and micro- 

 scopic study of nature, at the instance of science, has a tendency 

 to blunt in some minds a delicate perception for the "large liv- 

 ingness" of Nature, considered as a source of poetic and moral 

 inspiration, but no such tendency could be discovered in the in- 

 tellectual habitudes of Prof. Henry. To a mind long nurtured 

 by arts of close and critical inquiry into the logic of natural law 

 he none the less united a heart which was ever ready to leap 

 with joy at "the wonder and bloom of the world." When on the 

 occasion of his first visit to England, in the year 1887, he was 

 travelling by night in a stage-coach through Salisbury Plain, 

 he hired the driver to stop, while all his fellow-passengers were 

 asleep, that he might have the privilege of inspecting the ruins 

 of Stonehenge, as seen by moonlight, and brought away a weird 

 " sense of mystery " which followed him in all his after life. At a 

 later day, in the year 1810, after visiting the Aar Grlacier, the scene 

 of Prof. Agassiz's well-known labors, he crossed over the moun- 

 tain to the Rhone Valley, until, at a sudden turn of the road, he 

 came/ull in the presence of the majestic Glacier of the Rhone. 

 For minutes he stood silent and motionless ; then, turning to the 

 daughter who stood by his side, he exclaimed, with the tears run- 

 ning down his cheeks : " This is a place to die in. We should 

 go no further." 



And as he rejoiced in natural scenery so also was he charmed 

 with the beauties of art, whether as seen in " the well-stained 

 canvas or the featured stone," and hence it was that he felt as 

 much at home in the atelier of the painter or sculptor as in the 

 laboi'atory of the chemist or the apparatus room of the natural 

 philosopher, and exulted as sincerely in the Louvre or the Cor- 

 coran Gallery of Art as in the cabinet of the mineralogist or the 

 museum of the naturalist. 



