He died very quietly on
June 29, 1895. That he met death with the same calm faith and strength
with which he had met life is indicated by the lines which his wife
wrote and which he requested to be his epitaph:--
Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep; For still He giveth His
beloved sleep, And if an endless sleep He wills, so best.
To attempt an analysis of Huxley's character, unique and bafflingly
complex as it is, is beyond the scope of this sketch; but to give
only the mere facts of his life is to do an injustice to the vivid
personality of the man as it is revealed in his letters. All his human
interest in people and things--pets, and flowers, and family--brightens
many pages of the two ponderous volumes. Now one reads of his grief over
some backward-going plant, or over some garden tragedy, as "A lovely
clematis in full flower, which I had spent hours in nailing up, has just
died suddenly. I am more inconsolable than Jonah!" Now one is amused
with a nonsense letter to one of his children, and again with an
account of a pet. "I wish you would write seriously to M----. She is
not behaving well to Oliver. I have seen handsomer kittens, but few more
lively, and energetically destructive. Just now he scratched away at
something M---- says cost 13s. 6d. a yard and reduced more or less of it
to combings.
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