As one looked on that marble statue which only some weeks ago had so
warmly pressed one's hand, his whole life flashed through one's thoughts.
One remembered the young curate and the Saint's Tragedy; the chartist
parson and Alton Locke; the happy poet and the Sands of Dee; the
brilliant novel-writer and Hypatia and Westward-Ho; the Rector of
Eversley and his Village Sermons; the beloved professor at Cambridge, the
busy canon at Chester, the powerful preacher in Westminster Abbey. One
thought of him by the Berkshire chalk-streams and on the Devonshire
coast, watching the beauty and wisdom of Nature, reading her solemn
lessons, chuckling too over her inimitable fun. One saw him in
town-alleys, preaching the Gospel of godliness and cleanliness, while
smoking his pipe with soldiers and navvies. One heard him in drawing-
rooms, listened to with patient silence, till one of his vigorous or
quaint speeches bounded forth, never to be forgotten. How children
delighted in him! How young, wild men believed in him, and obeyed him
too! How women were captivated by his chivalry, older men by his genuine
humility and sympathy!

All that was now passing away--was gone. But as one looked on him for
the last time on earth, one felt that greater than the curate, the poet,
the professor, the canon, had been the man himself, with his warm heart,
his honest purposes, his trust in his friends, his readiness to spend
himself, his chivalry and humility, worthy of a better age.

Of all this the world knew little;--yet few men excited wider and
stronger sympathies.

Who can forget that funeral on the 28th Jan., 1875, and the large sad
throng that gathered round his grave? There was the representative of
the Prince of Wales, and close by the gipsies of the Eversley common, who
used to call him their Patrico-rai, their Priest-King. There was the old
Squire of his village, and the labourers, young and old, to whom he had
been a friend and a father. There were Governors of distant Colonies,
officers, and sailors, the Bishop of his diocese, and the Dean of his
abbey; there were the leading Nonconformists of the neighbourhood, and
his own devoted curates, Peers and Members of the House of Commons,
authors and publishers; and outside the church-yard, the horses and the
hounds and the huntsman in pink, for though as good a clergyman as any,
Charles Kingsley had been a good sportsman too, and had taken in his life
many a fence as bravely as h