1873 BUENEY PEIZE 9 



into real scientific work opened to him a new life, gave 

 him the first sense of power and of capacity. Now he 

 read Mr. Darwin's books, and it is impossible to over- 

 rate the extraordinary effect they had on the young 

 man's mind. Something of the feeling which Keats 

 describes in the sonnet ' On Looking into Chapman's 

 Homer ' seems to have been his : 



• Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 

 When a new planet swims into his ken ; 



Or like stout Cortez when, with eagle eyes, 

 He stared at the Pacific — and all his men 



Looked at each other with a wild surmise 

 Silent, upon a peak in Darien.' 



About the spring of 1872 Mr. Eomanes began to 

 show signs of ill-health. He was harassed by faint- 

 ness and incessant lassitude, but struggled on, going 

 up to Scotland in the summer and beginning to 

 shoot, under the belief that all he wanted was hard 

 exercise. At last he broke down and was declared to 

 be suffering from a bad attack of typhoid fever. He 

 had a very hard struggle for life, and owed a great 

 deal to Dr. Latham, who from Cambridge kept up a 

 constant telegraphic communication with the Boss- 

 shire doctors. It was a long and weary convales- 

 cence, beguiled in part by writing an essay on 

 ' Christian Prayer and General Laws,' the subject 

 assigned for the Burney Prize Essay of 1873. 



Much of this essay was dictated to one or other of 

 his sisters, and it is a curious fact that his first book 

 and his last should have been on theological subjects. 

 Both were written when he was struggling with great 

 bodily weakness, and in these months of early man- 

 hood he showed the same almost pathetic desire to 

 work, the same activity of thought which he displayed 



