Harvey's home life, which for several years had been very lonely, was transformed in 1861, when, at the age of fifty, he was married to Miss Phelps of Limerick, whom he had long known. But almost immediately afterwards the shadow of death appeared, haemorrhage from the lungs warning him that his newly found happiness might not endure. After a summer spent at his favourite Miltown Malbay, on the wild coast of Clare, he was able to resume his college duties and his work on _Flora Capensis_. Although he never fully recovered his health, he laboured diligently at the works he had in hand. He had a noble example of continued devotion to science in his old friend Sir William Hooker, whom he again visited, on returning from a tour on the Continent, in the autumn of 1863, to find him, in his seventy-ninth year, finishing off the last volume of his _Species Filicum_, and "already beginning to nibble at another book." This was a further work on ferns, the _Synopsis Filicum_, on which Hooker was busily engaged until within a few days of his death in the summer of 1865; it was completed by J. G. Baker and published three years later. During the winter of 1865, Harvey himself became seriously ill, and, an immediate change to a mild climate being recommended, he and his wife went to stay at Torquay with Lady Hooker, and there he died on 15th May, 1866. Harvey was only fifty-five years of age when he died, but he had won for himself a foremost place among systematic botanists. Life, as Lubbock has said, is measured by thought and action, not by time; and according to this standard, Harvey's life-cup was already full and running over. He had used to the utmost the gifts which he possessed. The capital with which he entered on his career comprised a critical eye, a deft hand, and that scientific enthusiasm without which no botanist ever travels far. On the other side of the account, he had two serious deterrents, a rather delicate body, and a complete absence of scientific training. "_Apropos_ of dissection," he writes to Hooker in his younger days, "I am a miserable manipulator, and should be very grateful for a few lessons." From the beginning he had a shrewd perception of what lay within his reach, and what was beyond it. "The extent to which I mean to go in botany," he wrote at twenty-one years, "is to know British plants of all kinds as well as possible; to know Algae of all countries _specially_ well; to collect all foreign Cryptogamia that may fall in my way, and to know them _moderately_ well.... My reason for choosing the _Algae_ is pure compassion; they being sadly neglected by the present generation, though at a former time they were in high favour."