f his own
sincerity in religion, his sense of sin, of God--reverting often to his
dying friend. Such a thing only occurred to me with him once or twice
all my life; and then when we were home, he was silent, shut up,
self-contained as before. He was himself conscious of this habit of
reticence, and what may be called _selfism_ to us, his children, and
lamented it. I remember his saying in a sort of mournful joke, "I have a
well of love; I know it; but it is a _well_, and a _draw_-well, to your
sorrow and mine, and it seldom overflows, but," looking with that
strange power of tenderness as if he put his voice and his heart into
his eyes, "you may always come hither to draw;" he used to say he might
take to himself Wordsworth's lines,--

"I am not one who much or oft delights
To season my fireside with personal talk."

And changing "though" into "if:"

"A well of love it may be deep,
I trust it is, and never dry;
What matter, though its waters sleep
In silence and obscurity?"

The expression of his affection was more like the shock of a Leyden jar,
than the continuous current of a galvanic circle.

There was, as I have said, a permanent chill given by my mother's death,
to what may be called the outer surface of his nature, and we at home
felt it much. The blood was thrown in upon the centre, and went forth in
energetic and victorious work, in searching the Scriptures and saving
souls; but his social faculty never recovered that shock! it was
blighted; he was always desiring to be alone and at his work. A stranger
who saw him for a short time, bright, animated, full of earnest and
cordial talk, pleasing and being pleased, the life of the company, was
apt to think how delightful he must always be,--and so he was; but these
times of bright talk were like angels' visits; and he smiled with
peculiar benignity on his retiring guest, as if blessing him not the
less for leaving him to himself. I question if there ever lived a man so
much in the midst of men, and in the midst of his own children,[20] in
whom the silences, as Mr. Carlyle would say, were so predominant. Every
Sabbath he spoke out of the abundance of his heart, his whole mind; he
was then communicative and frank enough: all the week, before and after,
he would not unwillingly have never opened his mouth. Of many people we
may say that their mouth is always open except when it is shut; of him
that his mouth was always shut except when it was opened