looking down with calm pity on the deserted rectory, and on the short
joys and the shorter sufferings of mortal men.

All went home feeling that life was poorer, and every one knew that
he had lost a friend who had been, in some peculiar sense, his own.
Charles Kingsley will be missed in England, in the English colonies,
in America, where he spent his last happy year; aye, wherever Saxon
speech and Saxon thought is understood. He will be mourned for,
yearned for, in every place in which he passed some days of his busy
life. As to myself, I feel as if another cable had snapped that tied
me to this hospitable shore.

When an author or a poet dies, the better part of him, it is often
said, is left in his works. So it is in many cases. But with
Kingsley his life and his works were one. All he wrote was meant for
the day when he wrote it. That was enough for him. He hardly gave
himself time to think of fame and the future. Compared with a good
work done, with a good word spoken, with a silent grasp of the hand
from a young man he had saved from mischief, or with a 'Thank you,
Sir,' from a poor woman to whom he had been a comfort, he would have
despised what people call glory, like incense curling away in smoke.
He was, in one sense of the word, a careless writer. He did his best
at the time and for the time. He did it with a concentrated energy
of will which broke through all difficulties. In his flights of
imagination, in the light and fire of his language he had few equals,
if any; but the perfection and classical finish which can be obtained
by a sustained effort only, and by a patience which shrinks from no
drudgery, these are wanting in most of his works.

However, fame, for which he cared so little, has come to him. His