m to urge him on a more
"dreamy" course than ever he dreamed of. "However," he remarks, "I
take very much my own course now, even as I have done before--Huxley
all over." Without being blinded by any vanity, he saw in the award
and the general estimate in which it was held a finger-post showing
as clearly as anything can what was the true career lying open before
him. Ambitious in the current sense of worldly success he was not. The
praise of men stirred a haunting mistrust of their judgment and his
own worthiness. Honours he valued as evidences of power; but no more.
What possessed him was, as he confessed in a letter meant only for
the eye of his future wife, "an enormous longing after the highest and
best in all shapes--a longing which haunts me and is the demon which
ever impels me to work, and will let me have no rest unless I am doing
his behests." With the sense of power stirring within him, he
refused to be beholden to any man. Patronage he abhorred in an ago
of patronage. He was ready to accept a helping hand from any one who
thought him capable of forwarding the great cause in ever so small a
way; but on no other terms. If the time had come to speak out on any
matter, he was resolved to let no merely personal influence restrain
him. He cared only for the praise or blame of the understanding few.
Whatever the popular judgment, he knew there was a work to be done and
that he had power to do it; and this was his personal ambition--to
do that work in the world, and to do it without cant and humbug and
self-seeking. Such were the aims that, newly returned to England, he
confides to the sister who had ever prophesied great things of "her
boy"; and in the end he made good the works spoken so boldly, yet
surely in no mere spirit of boasting. He "left his mark somewhere,
clear and distinct," without taint of the insincerities which he had
an almost morbid dread of discovering in any act of his own.

It was not every one who could dare to range so far and wide as Huxley
did from the original line of investigation he had taken up. Friends
warned him against what appeared to be a scattering of his energies.
If he devoted himself to that morphology of the Invertebrates in which
his new and illuminating conceptions had promptly earned the Royal
Medal, he would easily be the first in his field. But what he did was
in great part of set purpose. He was no mere collector of specimens,
no mere describer of species. He sought the