304 WHITWELL: THE LATE BISHOP OF WAKEFIELD. 
a one was never fulfilled, though I still possess and value 
life me 
s, ha 
botanical pursuits to be other than recreative, and the study of the 
ubi would in my own case at any rate be the reverse of that. And 
I must confess to an abiding doubt—an ignorant doubt it may be— 
whether the multitudinous varieties now named have any permanency. 
No account of the Bishop’s life can be complete without mention 
of its connection with Barmouth. He visited that sea-side resort in 
the first place, I suppose, for the sake of its glorious scenery and the 
richness of its flora. But before long, in the quiet Llanaber church- 
yard, i! 
A little grave beside the shining sea 
became a magnet to draw him thither which never lost its attractive’ 
power. In the third of the ‘Three All-Saints’ Summers’ poems, 
dated 1854, the poet-father tells how he and his wife watched a sick 
child (their first-born) through alternations of hope and fear. One 
day— 
hope burned up agai 
And then I climb’d fh highest mountsn- pon, 
And all the earth was glad with me 
aie I ioe a 
Whether. the sun were bright, or ait were fair. 
*Twas very dark with me: I dare not write it. 
And now he sleepeth in a little 
Beside the shining sea, the broad bright sea. 
In a charming poem written in 1885—‘ A Vision of Barmouth’—he 
tells how as he paced the hot streets of London he saw 
—a sketch in a window; and passably done: 
and how it recalled ‘the well-known, the dearly-loved view’ ; and he 
describes the flowers and the features of the scenery, as memory 
recalled them all. The last lines are— 
h me! yet the spot that is fairest and dearest to me 
Is a little lone grave by the side of the broad shining sea. ! 
The summer vacation was thenceforth usually spent at Barmouth for 
many years. 
There, in 1868, the future Bishop had a narrow escape from 
found himself unable to return, and was overpowered, and fin 
cast unconscious on the beach. But his life was happily saved when _ 
| r. 
all seeme 
agli 
y 
