g2 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, vi 



... It is as if all that old life at Holmwood had merely been 

 a preparation for the reaj life of our love — as if we were then 

 children ignorant of life's real purpose — as if these last months 

 had merely been my old doubts over again, whether I had rightly 

 or wrongly interpreted the manner and the words that had given 

 me hope. . . . 



We will begin the new love of woman and man, no longer 

 that of boy and girl, conscious that we have aims and pur- 

 poses as well as affections, and that if love is sweet life is dread- 

 fully stern and earnest. 



As time went on and no permanency offered — although 

 a good deal of writing fell in his way — the strain told 

 heavily upon him. In the autumn he was quite out of sorts, 

 body and mind, more at war with himself than he ever 

 was in his life before. All this, he writes, had darkened his 

 thoughts, had made him once more imagine a hopeless dis- 

 crepancy between the two of them in their ways of thinking 

 and objects in life. It was not till November 1853 that this 

 depression was banished by the trust and confidence of her 

 last letter. " I wish to Heaven," he writes, " it had reached 

 me six months ago. It would have saved me a world of 

 pain and error." But with this, the worst period of mental 

 suffering was over, and every haunting doubt was finally 

 exorcised. His career was made possible by the steady 

 faith which neither separation nor any misgiving nor its own 

 troubles could shake. And from this point all things began 

 to brighten. His health had been restored by a trip to the 

 Pyrenees with his brother George in September. He had 

 got work that enabled him to regard the Admiralty and its 

 menaces with complete equanimity ; a Manual of Compara- 

 tive Anatomy, for Churchill the publisher, regular work on 

 the Westminster* and another book in prospect, " so that 

 if I quit the Service to-morrow, these will give me more than 



* This regular work was the article on Contemporary Science, which 

 in October 1854 he got Tyndall to share with him. For, he writes, 

 "To give some account of the books in one's own department is no 

 particular trouble, and comes with me under the head of being paid 

 for what I mtist, in any case, do — but I neither will, nor can, go on 

 writing about books in other departments, of which I am not com- 

 petent to form a judgment even if I had the time to give to them."' 



