444 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap. 



caterwauling " : a busy man, time and patience failed him 



to wade through the trivial discursiveness of so much of 



Wordsworth's verse; thus unfortunately he never realised 



the full value of a poet in whom the mass of ore bears so 



large a proportion to the pure metal. Shelley was too 



diffuse to be among his first favourites ; but for simple 



beauty, Keats ; for that, and for the comprehension of the 



meaning of modern science, Tennyson ; for strength and 



feeling, Browning as represented by his earlier poems. 



; These were the favourites among the moderns. He knew 



j his eighteenth-century classics, but knew better his Milton 



! and his Shakespeare, to whom he turned with ever-increas- 



' ing satisfaction, as men do who have lived a full life. 



His early acquaintance with German had given him a 

 lasting admiration of the greatest representatives of German 

 literature, Goethe above all, in whose writings he found a 

 moral grandeur to be ranked with that of the Hebrew 

 prophets. Eager to read Dante in the original, he spent 

 much of his leisure on board the Rattlesnake in making out 

 the Italian with the aid of a dictionary, and in this way came 

 to know the beauties of the Divina Commedia. On the other 

 hand, it was a scientific interest which led him in later life 

 to take up his Greek, though one use he put it to was to 

 read Homer in the original. 



Though he was a great novel-reader, and, as he grew 

 older, would always have a novel ready to take up for a 

 while in the evening, his chief reading, in German and 

 French as well as English, was philosophy and history. 



His recreations were, as a rule, literary, and consisted 

 in a change of mental occupation. The only times I can 

 remember his playing an outdoor game are in the late 

 sixties, when he started his elder children at cricket on the 

 common at Littlehampton, and in 1871 when he played golf 

 at St. Andrews. When first married, he promised his wife 

 to reserve Saturday afternoons for recreation, and con- 

 stantly went with her to the Ella concerts. She persuaded 

 him also to take exercise by playing fives with Mr. Herbert 

 Spencer ; but the pressure of work before long absorbed all 

 his time. In his youth he was extremely fond of chess, and 



