360 



LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xx 



We have heard nothing of you and your wife for ages. Ask 

 her to give us news, good news I hope, of both. 



My wife is better than she was, and joins with me in love. — 

 Ever yours affectionately, T. H. Huxley. 



On his way home from the funeral in Westminster 

 Abbey, Huxley passed the time in the train by shaping out 

 some lines on the dead poet, the form of them suggested 

 partly by some verses of his wife's, partly by Schiller's 



Gib diesen Todten mir heraus, 

 Ich muss ihn wieder haben,* 



which came back to his mind in the Abbey. The lines were 

 published in the Nineteenth Century for November 1892. 

 He declared that he deserved no credit for the verses ; they 

 merely came to him in the train. 



His own comparison of them with the sheaf of professed 

 poets' odes which also appeared in the same magazine, 

 comes in a letter to his wife, to whom he sent the poem 

 as soon as it appeared in print. 



I know you want to see the poem, so I have cut it and the 

 rest out of the Nineteenth just arrived, and sent it. 



If I were to pass judgment upon it in comparison with the 

 others, I should say, that as to style it is hammered, and as to 

 feeling human. 



They are castings of much prettier pattern and of mainly 

 poetico-classical educated-class sentiment. I do not think there 

 is a line of mine one of my old working-class audience would 

 have boggled over. I would give a penny for John Burns' 

 thoughts about it. (N.B. — Highly impartial and valuable criti- 

 cism.) 



He also wrote to Professor Romanes, who had been 

 moved by this new departure to send him a volume of his 

 own poems : — 



HODESLEA, A T OV. 3, l8g2. 



My dear Romanes — I must send you a line to thank you 

 very much for your volume of poems. A swift glance shows me 

 much that has my strong sympathy — notably " Pater loquitur," 

 which I shall read to my wife as soon as I get her back. Against 



* Don Carlos, Sc. ix. 



