essential thing: the spirit which gives life!" (4/26.)

Physically, according to the testimony of his contemporaries, he was
already as an admirable photograph represents him twenty years later: he
wore a large black felt hat; his face was shaven, the chin strong and
wilful, the eyes vigilant, deep-set and penetrating; he hardly changed, and
it was thus I saw him later, at a more advanced age.

The ancient Abbey of Saint-Martial, where these lectures were given, was
occupied also by the Requien Museum, of which Fabre had charge. It was here
that he one day met John Stuart Mill.

The celebrated philosopher and economist had just lost his wife: "the most
precious friendship of his life" was ended. (4/27.) It was only after long
waiting that he had been able to marry her. Subjected at an early age by a
father devoid of tenderness and formidably severe to the harshest of
disciplines, he had learned in childhood "what is usually learned only by a
man." Scarcely out of his long clothes, he was construing Herodotus and the
dialogues of Plato, and the whole of his dreary youth was spent in covering
the vast field of the moral and mathematical sciences. His heart, always
suppressed, never really expanded until he met Mrs. Harriett Taylor.

This was one of those privileged beings such as seem as a rule to exist
only in poetry and literature; a woman as beautiful as she was
astonishingly gifted with the rarest faculties; combining with the most
searching intelligence and the most persuasive eloquence so exquisite a
sensitiveness that she seemed often to divine events in advance.

Mill possessed her at last for a few years only, and he had resigned his
post in the offices of the East India Company to enjoy a studious retreat