The last years of Huxley’s life were indeed the longed-for Indian summer.  Away from the noise of London at Eastbourne by the sea, he spent many happy hours with old-time friends and in his garden, which was a great joy to him.  His large family of sons and daughters and grandchildren brought much cheer to his last days.  Almost to the end he was working and writing for publication.  Three days before his death he wrote to his old friend, Hooker, that he didn’t feel at all like “sending in his checks” and hoped to recover.  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.  M——­ therefore excludes him from the dining-room and all those opportunities of higher education which he would have in my house.”  Frequently one finds a description of some event, so vividly done that the mere reading of it seems like a real experience.  An account of Tennyson’s burial in Westminster is a typical bit of description:—­

Bright sunshine streamed through the windows of the nave, while the choir was in half gloom, and as each shaft of light illuminated the flower-covered bier as it slowly travelled on, one thought of the bright succession of his works between the darkness before and the darkness after.  I am glad to say that the Royal Society was represented by four of its chief officers, and nine of the commonalty, including myself.  Tennyson has a right to that, as the first poet since Lucretius who has understood the drift of science.