The image of a man that seldom smiled and yet so easily won his fellows to like him seems out of the drawing of nature and yet in this case is essentially true. There was in Rizal’s face something almost irresistibly winning. Good will looked out of it and warm human sympathy and a kind of downright sincerity that found a way to the notice of even the dullest. It seemed to one studying him attentively that on the original lines of a being all love, gentleness, and meditation had been stamped later a great melancholy and a great and high resolve. Lowly men seemed to understand instinctively something in him they could never have formulated nor described, something friendly and good; and men of learning turned with a similar impulse to a mind that showed itself so wealthy and still so unpretending. He loved music, was a good judge of it, and composed it readily and well. He loved flowers as all other things beautiful—of course, being an artist born and the instinct ineradicable in him! That charming poem of his, “The Flowers of Heidelberg” [144] was written in the intervals between his pursuits of the most advanced discoveries and driest facts in ophthalmology, surgery, ethnology, entomology, anthropology, and the penning of some of the fiercest passages of condensed wrath to be found in any language. It is likely that he saw nothing grotesque in these abrupt transitions; perfectly sincere men have little time for such nice questionings. If we regard the making of poetry as the serious business of his soul, which it was, his chief intellectual relaxation was chess, of which, by the time of his second visit to Madrid, he had become a notable player. [145] He had as little vanity as any man conscious of his powers could reasonably have. Yet he was always careful of his appearance and took pains to dress well, after the most modest taste. Even when he was poverty-stricken in Berlin and living on a daily bowl of coffee and piece of bread, he would allow himself no laxity in his attire.