I believe it is this deep, sorrowful sense of all that is most sad and most awful in our mortal lot, a sense which we escape amid the rushing to and fro of London, but which settles down on our souls in such a home as I have pictured, which makes the country unendurable to many, as the shadows of the evening lengthen. To accept it, and look straight at the grave towards which they are walking down the shortened vista of their years, taxes men’s courage and faith beyond their strength, and they fly back to the business and the pleasures wherein such solemn thoughts are forgotten and drowned. And yet beneath our cowardice there is the longing that our little race should round itself once again to the old starting point; that where we spent our blessed childhood, and rested on our mother’s breast, and lisped our earliest prayers, there also we should lay down the burden of life, and repent its sins, and thank the Giver for its joys, and fall asleep,—to awaken, we hope, in the eternal Home. ----- Footnote 1: Several such critics, writing of the essay in this book on the “Scientific Spirit of the Age” when it appeared in the _Contemporary Review_ for July, condemned me for failing to do adequate justice to Science, quite regardless of my reiterated assertions (see pp. 6, 7, 34) that I was writing exclusively on the adverse side, and left the glorification of the modern Diana of the Ephesians to the mixed multitude of her followers. Footnote 2: “Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great delight, and even as a school-boy I took intense delight in Shakespeare. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now, for many years, I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music.”—Darwin’s _Life_, vol. i. p. 101. Footnote 3: Darwin’s _Life_, vol. i. p. 101. Said of himself by Darwin. Footnote 4: That organ of the Scientific party, the _British Medical Journal_, eulogizing this address, remarked that “Sir James is a master of English, clothing all his thoughts in the most elegant language.” To the mere literary mind the above definitions may be thought to leave something to be desired on the score of “elegance.” Footnote 5: