Now the task is done; and he can sit alone in his upstairs room in Artillery Walk and thank God that in spite of blindness, private sorrows and public disappointments, he had been enabled at last to bear the witness of a work of immortal beauty to the high truth {84} that had been in him even from a boy. So it may have been in the graver moments of solitude; while, as we know from several sources, there were other times, when he would enjoy the companionship of friends and the homage of learned strangers by whom we are told he was "much visited, more than he did desire." The picture suggested to us is that of a man who at sixty-five, then a greater age than now, retained all his powers of mind and much of the physical beauty which had been so remarkable in his youth; who was gracious but somewhat reserved and dignified with strangers; a delightful companion to friends and especially to younger men; full of literature, especially of poetry, and with a memory that enabled him to recite long passages from Homer and Virgil; above all, an ardent lover of music, making a practice, so far as possible, of hearing some, whether vocal or instrumental, every afternoon. His ears were eyes to him; and when he heard a lady sing finely he would say: "Now will I swear this lady is handsome." All kinds of music, and not only the severer, were delightful to the "organ-voice of England." That is not the least interesting thing about him. The greatest of England's Puritans {85} was also the greatest of her artists. He had nothing in him of the morbid scrupulosity which is such an inhuman feature in French Jansenism and some of the English sects. His was a large nature which demanded a free expansion of life. Lonely figure as he is in our literary history, with no real predecessors or followers, his mighty arch yet bridges the gulf between Elizabeth and the Revolution, and is of nearer or less distant kin to Shakspeare than to Pope. His prose is the swan song of the old eloquence, as inspired and as confused as an oracle. To read it when it is at its best is to soar on wings through the empyrean and despise Swift and Addison walking in neat politeness on the pavement. There as everywhere, in his verse, in his character, in his mind, in his life, he has the strength and the weakness of an aristocrat. The youth who in his Cambridge days was "esteemed a virtuous person yet not to be ignorant of his parts" did not belie the opinion formed of him in either of those respects. His Republicanism was of the proud Roman sort, and at least as near Coriolanus as Gracchus; a boundless faith in the State and a boundless desire to spend and be spent in its service, a total and scornful indifference to the opinions of all {86} those, though they might be five-sixths of the nation, who did not desire to be served in the way which he had decided to be for their good. The modern way of deciding matters of State by counting heads may very likely be the best of many