and there couldn't have been much in mine at that moment, life was so
interesting, and its horizon so full of light and color! Of his wife,
"Moo," who outlived him many years, how much one might say! In this very
year, 1889, Huxley wrote to her from the Canaries, whither he had gone
alone for his health:

Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been horridly
anxious. Nobody--children or any one else--can be to me what you
are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and this
absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in
other things.

They were indeed lovers to the end. He had waited and served for her
eight years in his youth, and her sunny, affectionate nature, with its
veins both of humor and of stoicism, gave her man of genius exactly what
he wanted. She survived him for many years, living her own life at
Eastbourne, climbing Beachy Head in all weathers, interested in
everything, and writing poems of little or no technical merit, but
raised occasionally by sheer intensity of feeling--about her
husband--into something very near the real thing. I quote these lines
from a privately printed volume she gave me:

If you were here,--and I were where you lie,
Would you, beloved, give your little span
Of life remaining unto tear and sigh?
No!--setting every tender memory
Within your breast, as faded roses kept
For giver's sake, of giver when bereft,
Still to the last the lamp of work you'd burn
For purpose high, nor any moment spurn.