ch exhausted that he could not go
again to Norway with Lord Ducie,* though with characteristic pluck
he half thought of paying another visit to Sir George Grey in New
Zealand. But it was not to be. During the summer his strength
failed, and it became known that the disorder was incurable. With
philosophic calmness he awaited the inevitable close, feeling, as he
had always felt, that he was in the hands of God. His religion, very
deep, constant, and genuine, was not a spiritual emotion, nor a
dogmatic creed, but a calm and steady confidence that, whatever weak
mortals might do, the Judge of all the earth would do right. "It is
impossible," said Emerson, whom he loved and admired, "for a man not
to be always praying." The relations of such men with the unseen are
an inseparable part of their daily lives. Froude had no more
sympathy with the self-complacent "agnosticism" of modern thought
than he had with Catholic authority or ecstatic revivalism. To fear
God and to keep His commandments was with him the whole duty of man.
The materialistic hypothesis he rejected as incredible, explaining
nothing, meaning nothing, a presumptuous attempt to put ignorance in
the place of knowledge.

--
* "Ducie wanted me to go to Norway with him, salmon-fishing; but I
didn't feel that I could do justice to the opportunity. In the debased
state to which I am reduced, if I hooked a thirty-pound salmon, I
should only pray him to get off."--Table Talk of Shirley, pp. 222, 223.
--

His soul had always dwelt apart. His early training did not
encourage spiritual sympathy, and, except in his books, he
habitually kept silence on ultimate things. But he had always
thought of them; and as he lay dying, in almost the last moments of
consciousness, he repeated dearly to himself those great, those
superhuman lines which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Macbeth
between his wife's death and his own.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle;
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.

Still later he murmured, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do
right?"

He died on the 20th of October, 1894, and was buried at Salcombe in
his beloved Devonshire not far from his beloved sea. He "made his
everlasting