THE CROWNING YEARS 319 



with age but pink with more than the freshness of 

 a young man, he adjured them in futile German, 

 in his thin, inaudible voice, to form themselves into 

 a new Church, the great Association of Monists. 

 Few heard and less understood him, but his name 

 was on every heart and his reception superb. 



A week afterwards I picked up a London journal 

 in an Italian hotel, and read — as hundreds of 

 thousands had done — that a miserable Freethought 

 conference had been held at Rome : that its rowdy 

 proceedings had disgusted the scholars who had, in 

 a misguided moment, lent their names to it. Thus 

 are we informed at times. I remembered Sergi's 

 enthusiastic comments at the close. " B magnifico, 

 e magnifico," was all he could gasp. I remembered 

 Haeckel's exultation as we walked home to his 

 Albergo Santa Chiara, and Berthelot's deep joy. 

 The same scholars, except Bjornsen, took part in 

 the Congress at Paris, in 1905, when 100,000 of us 

 were nobly received by the Conseil Municipal. 

 But Haeckel was too unwell to come. Nature has 

 laid her hand on him at length, and bade him 

 hang his weapons on the wall. He can but hope 

 to remain a passive spectator for a few years more 

 of that vast stirring of the Latin peoples which he 

 has so much contributed to bring about. 



His last active effort was the delivery of three 

 lectures at Berlin in the spring of 1906. He has 

 always avoided public lectures as much as possible. 

 His poor voice and comparative nervousness make 

 the work unattractive. A severe attack of influenza 

 sapped his strength in the winter of 1905, and he 



