to gather up new knowledge, and to get into friendly
touch with every kind of man, the same reluctance to talk about himself.
Only the yearning towards the unseen was growing stronger. The poet
Whittier, who met him at Boston, found him unwilling to talk about his
own books or even about the new cities which he was visiting, but
longing for counsel from his brother poet on the high themes of a future
life and the final destiny of the human race.

While he was in California he was taken ill with pleurisy; and when he
came back to England he had so serious a relapse in the autumn that he
could hardly perform his duties at Westminster. He had never wished for
long life, his strength was exhausted, the ardent soul had worn out its
sheath. A dangerous illness of his wife's, threatening to leave him
solitary, hastened the end. For her sake he fought a while against the
pneumonia which set in, but the effort was in vain, and on January 23,
in his own room at Eversley, he met his death contented and serene.
Twenty years before he had said, 'God forgive me if I am wrong, but I
look forward to it with an intense and reverent curiosity'.

These words of his sum up some of his most marked characteristics. Of
his 'curiosity' there is no need to say more: all his life he was
pursuing eager researches into rocks, flowers, animals, and his
fellow-men. 'Intensity' has been picked out by many of his friends as
the word which, more than any other, expresses the peculiar quality of
his nature. This does not mean a weak excitability. His letters to J. S.
Mill on the women-suffrage movement show that this hysterical element,
which was often to be found in the women supporting it, was what most he
feared. He himself defines it well--'my blessed habit of intensity. I go
at what I am about as if there was nothing else in the world for the
time being.' This quality, which many great men put into their work,
Kingsley put both into his work and into his play-time. Critics will say
that he paid for it: it is easy to quote the familiar line: 'Neque
semper arcum tendit Apollo.' But Horace is not the poet to whom Charles
Kingsley would go for counsel: he would only say that he got full value
in both, and that he never regretted the bargain.

But it would be no less true to say that 'Reverence' is the key-note of
his character. This fact was impressed on all who saw him take the
services in his parish church, and it was an exaltation of reverence
whi