Nobody who knew the modest Cobham cottage while its master lived will ever forget it; the garden beside the Mole, where every bush and flower-bed had its history; and that little study-dressing-room where some of the best work in nineteenth-century letters was done. Not a great multitude of books, but all cherished, all read, each one the friend of its owner. No untidiness anywhere; the ordinary litter of an author's room was quite absent. For long after his death the room remained just as he had left it, his coat hanging behind the door, his slippers beside his chair, the last letters he had received, and all the small and simple equipment of his writing-table ready to his hand, waiting for the master who would never know "a day of return." In that room--during fifteen years, he wrote _God and the Bible_, the many suggestive and fruitful Essays, including the American addresses, of his later years--seeds, almost all of them, dropped into the mind of his generation for a future harvesting; a certain number of poems, including the noble elegiac poem on Arthur Stanley's death, "Geist's Grave" and "Poor Matthias"; a mass of writing on education which is only now, helped by the war, beginning to tell on the English mind; and the endlessly kind and gracious letters to all sorts and conditions of men--and women--the literary beginner, the young teacher wanting advice, even the stranger greedy for an autograph. Every little playful note to friends or kinsfolk he ever wrote was dear to those who received it; but he--the most fastidious of men--would have much disliked to see them all printed at length in Mr. Russell's indiscriminate volumes. He talked to me once of his wish to make a small volume--"such a little one!"--of George Sand's best letters. And that is just what he would have wished for himself. Among the letters that reached me on my uncle's death was one from Mr. Andrew Lang denouncing almost all the obituary notices of him. "Nobody seems to know that he _was a poet_!" cries Mr. Lang. But his poetic blossoming was really over with the 'sixties, and in the hubbub that arose round his critical and religious work--his attempts to drive "ideas" into the English mind, in the 'sixties and 'seventies--the main fact that he, with Browning and Tennyson, _stood for English poetry_, in the mid-nineteenth century, was often obscured and only slowly recognized. But it was recognized, and he himself had never any real doubt of it, from the moment when he sent the "Strayed Reveller" to my father in New Zealand in 1849, to those later times when his growing fame was in all men's ears. He writes to his sister in 1878: It is curious how the public is beginning to take my poems to its bosom after long years of comparative neglect. The wave of thought and change has rolled on until people begin to find a significance and an attraction in what had none for them formerly.