write poetry in those days, but he was shy of confessing it, and
very conscious of the demerits of what he wrote. I have some of his
youthful verses by me, and though they are very unequal and full of
lapses, yet he often strikes a firm note and displays a subtle
insight. I think that he was more ambitious than I perhaps knew,
and had that vague belief in his own powers which is characteristic
of able and unambitious men. His was certainly, on the whole, a
cold nature in those days. He could take up a friendship where he
laid it down, by virtue of an easy frankness and a sympathy that
was intellectual rather than emotional. But the suspension of
intercourse with a friend never troubled him.

I became aware, in the course of a walking tour that I took with
him in those days, that he had a deep perception of the beauties of
nature; it was not a vague accessibility to picturesque
impressions, but a critical discernment of quality. He always said
that he cared more for little vignettes, which he could grasp
entire, than for wide and majestic prospects; and this was true of
his whole mind.

I suppose that I tended to idealise him; but he certainly seems to
me, in retrospect, to have then been invested with a singular
charm. He was pure-minded and fastidious to a fault. He had
considerable personal beauty, rather perhaps of expression than of
feature. He was one of those people with a natural grace of
movement, gesture and speech. He was wholly unembarrassed in
manner, but he talked little in a mixed company. No one had fewer
enemies or fewer intimate friends. The delightful ears soon came to
an end, and one of the few times I ever saw him exhibit strong
emotion was on the evening before he left Cambridge, when he